The XX Factor: What women really think.

Hair-Color Industry: Cockroach of the Economic Apocalypse

Conde Nast Portfolio polled its readers to ask "where they've already cut back or where they plan to in the coming year." The results provide a little bit of an unsettling look at our priorities. The top and bottom results, with a selection from the middle:

Stop eating out: 29.4%

Move in with parents: 8.1%

Stop buying clothes: 7.3%

Sell eggs or sperm: 5.4%

Sell home: 1.8%

Let go of housekeeper: 1.6%

Stop coloring hair: 1.1%

Stopping buying clothes is a more upsetting prospect than moving in with the 'rents? Selling one's entire home is less depressing than laying off the household help? And five times more people insist they would sell their eggs than say they'd stop dyeing their hair?

P.S. Reader MK notes that "the unusual distribution probably has less to do with relative preferences between dissimilar solutions and more to do with how desperate people are," suggesting that it's a different class of people contemplating selling their home than considering stopping coloring their hair. Very true, and related to the point Torie made. Still, this wasn't a random survey; it was a poll of readers of Conde Nast Portfolio, whose financial situations are probably more alike. I'd reckon a majority of women who answered that poll color their hair. The finding struck me, too, because it jibed with a (yes, small and random) anecdote I heard at the place I get my hair cut, which does a big business in "color." The stylists at this salon reported a recent uptick in requests for coloring, not a downturn.