Can You Pass as Upper Class?
If you look poor, you may be treated accordingly
People watching is fun and I could do it all day, especially when I’m a fish out of water while traveling, but it’s still fun even in my own fishpond.
Even as we tell people not to judge a book by its cover, we all do it. (And if you take a deep dive into book marketing, you’ll learn that even the best book in the world requires an excellent cover.)
From one quick glance – before you open your mouth and regardless of whether you’re wearing designer duds or Walmart sweats, people can pick up a lot about you, including whether you have money.
How we look matters a lot more than we think
And it’s not just your dress, your accent or anything like that: It’s your face and all those micro-differences in your expression and even how happy you look, researchers say.
In The Visibility of Social Class From Facial Cues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people were able to pick out a person’s socioeconomic class just by looking at cropped, grayscale pictures of just their faces.
These judgments take less than a second, according to First Impression: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face in the American Psychological Association journal.
Behold my resting not-rich face
Even before I read these studies, I figured people could tell I did not grow up with money and still don’t have any.
When I was fresh out of college, I got a job at a now-defunct weekly society newspaper. For the first time in my life, I was regularly spending time in places I’d never be invited to otherwise.
It was Posh Peoria Style – some Caterpillar execs, other business leaders, elected officials, various society people and that sort of thing. It took me a while to feel comfortable swimming in those waters.
And I would look at people and think, “Now what exactly is it about this person?” It’s a je ne sais quoi thing.
And speaking of je ne sais quoi, if you step foot into France or any other country, they will know you are an American, or at least foreign. You’ll think you’re blending, but shopkeepers may greet you in English.
When you’re in an airport, you have probably noticed you can pick out the non-Americans at a glance, even when they’re wearing clothes that aren’t overtly foreign, without being able to explain how you know.
I’m sure it’s an evolutionary thing that helped our ancestors make instant friend-or-foe decisions.
Can we change how we look?
When my husband and I are watching a show, I love to pull up the bios of the actors and see what they really look like.
Remember Jon Heder in Napoleon Dynamite? He’s a pretty good-looking guy, but you can’t see it in that movie. Compare Rosamund Pike of I Care a Lot and The Wheel of Time. I can barely tell it’s the same person.
If you watched The Americans, a spy show in which the main characters wear many disguises, you’ll marvel at the different looks of Keri Russell. She’s so gorgeous it almost hurts to look at her, but her character wears all kinds of disguises, and in some scenes, she’s as dowdy as I am and you can’t detect her beauty at all.
Actors are probably better at pulling off alternate personas than the rest of us.
But we all think we’re models and actors now
That’s why 20-somethings have skin routines and everybody is getting Botox if not outright plastic surgery and people buy new clothes more often than they do their laundry. We all care about looks more than ever now, probably because our phones filter us into thinking we could be much better looking with a few small tweaks.
People want to look younger, more attractive and richer – and it’s not just vanity at play here. If you’re looking for a job or a partner, your looks matter much more than they should, which is bad news for people like me.
You’ve probably had the naked-in-public dream
Not long ago, on spring break in Sarasota with some of my family, the grandchildren wanted ice cream. Everyone else went inside to order and I sat at a sidewalk table outside to save some seats.
Night had fallen while we were out, and the evening crowd looked very different from the day crowd. I had my hair in a ponytail and was wearing just a bathing suit with a T-shirt over the top of it. But nobody else there looked beachy. One glamorous-looking woman after another filed past as I sat there with no makeup and no pants.
This was barely one step away from the old naked-in-public dream, and I was dying a thousand deaths as I people-watched and wondered what could possibly be taking so long – were they making the damned ice cream from scratch? Was somebody milking a cow in the back?
And then it occurred to me that if I were actually wealthy, I wouldn’t worry one bit about what anybody there thought of me. I sat up straight, rearranged my face and pretended I was quite comfortable sitting there without pants – in fact, perhaps I preferred it. “A woman in my position need not wear pants,” I projected. Or so I hoped.
What does this have to do with income inequality?
If people are making instant judgments on others based on their appearance – including who they’ll hire or promote or admit to their clubs – that makes it much harder for people to advance into higher socioeconomic classes, and that goes against our supposed everyone-is-created-equal values.
I hate to say this, but it probably does pay to put a lot of effort into your looks. I can’t see myself doing that, but I can guarantee I will never again go anywhere without pants.
About Michelle Teheux:
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me on Medium or Substack. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.
A couple of decades ago my daughter went through a rough period of injury then illness. We frequently had to go to the big city hospital a couple of hours away. I quickly figured out that if I dressed way up, in formal business class garb, that we received much better attention and care. After a year I thought maybe it was all in my head so for one appointment I dressed in my normal schlubby comfy clothes, only to be shocked at the degradation in care we received. The lesson was duly learned and keeping my goals in mind, I dressed up for any in-person appointments ever since then.
I've always told myself that if I ever win the mother lode one day, I'm going to dress like my usual self (sweats and no makeup) and walk into a Mercedes dealership to see if I get ignored. Whichever salesperson appears to treat me like a customer without judging will get the sale in cash AND a new car for him/herself.