But economic depressions have a funny way of reinforcing gender stereotypes. Just as the female economists at the Bank of England have been urged to up their use of lipstick, it seems likely that homo recessionus may well retreat to older models of masculinity. A man who blows his cash on lip balm no longer seems like the sort of mate you want on your arm as you stride through life's tricky stretches together. Suddenly, carbolic soap and a squirt of generic supermarket deodorant have never smelt so right.

Interestingly, the boost that the recession has given to sales of cosmetics may not hold true across the entire range of women's self-care products. When it comes to skincare, common sense suggests that we may well go flocking back to what might politely be called "heritage" brands, in other words those solid but dull skincare ranges which your mother and grandmother swore by. Olay (Oil of Ulay to those of us over 35), Nivea and good old Boots have been doing remarkably well recently. Some industry watchers suggest that these old-timers have been taking sales away from the kind of skin creams which sell for £200 and boast a roll-call of high-tech ingredients.

In making this shift from pseudo-complexity to the tried and tested, consumers may well be thinking of what happened recently in the banking sector. Where once we were happy to believe that the people in charge knew much better than us about the workings of international finance, now we wonder whether a bit of common sense book-keeping, the sort of thing we all have to do at the end of the month, the quarter, the year, might not have been in order. In the same way, there now no longer seems any good reason to believe that a skincare product needs to sound as if it is on nodding terms with the periodic table. A dash of Pond's cream - and a swipe of bold, bright lipstick - will do just as well.