By Elaine Carlson

Before I went out the other day I reached for my lipstick. Quickly I told myself I don't need to do that. I certainly won't be needing to put on lipstick when I will be wearing a mask. What would be the point?

It seems obvious to me that in addition to everything else Covid 19 has caused the sales of lipstick to drop. What else could you expect when women don't need to use lipstick? Has any market research been done on the subject? Maybe I will be able to find out by looking online.

I go to my computer and type in "Market Research Lipstick Sales." And wouldn't you know it but the seventh response is an article with the headline "Lipstick Sales Just Jumped More Than 80%." (New York CNN May 21, 2021). Such an increase means that before sales were down.

The article said, "Face masks and lockdown orders have kept lips largely out of sight in the pandemic. They consequently hurt lipstick sales last year." But went on to state "lipstick sales hit $34.2 million in the four weeks ending April 18" causing that 80% jump.

It is good that after such a steep decline sales are beginning to go back up. Could these bigger sales figures be an indication that our medical nightmare is coming to an end? The authors of the article don't seem to think so. They stress that the bigger sales "still fell short of pre-pandemic levels of over $40 million."

Wouldn't you know it by the time I formulate my question and do my online search (08-17-2021) the upward trend of lipstick sales is already old news – that surge was "in the four weeks ending April 18."

I don't want to exaggerate the importance of knowing about the use and sales of a cosmetic this year. Scientists will be able to track the origin and spread of Covid 19 very well without looking at that finding or indeed at any market research. Still we are talking about a tiny bit of information that tells a little bit of the story of what happened during the Pandemic.

Now as a society we know a lot about what is happening. Looking back and reviewing is better than looking while it is happening. All of the evidence doesn't happen until something is history.

A lot of the news coverage of the Covid 19 Pandemic focuses on the people who are against the vaccine. But there is nothing new about people not following the advice of disease experts. At the beginning of the 20th Century scientists in Panama released their finding that Yellow Fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. But some of the hospitals (we are talking the actions of nurses and doctors here) put all of the legs of their beds into containers that held water.

And one of the generalizations social scientists make is that society (people?) tend to think a current crisis is the biggest (or worst) crisis ever. Almost since the beginning of Covid 19 some people have stated that this is the worst health crisis ever. Only a person who knows (or understands) very little about history would be able to make such a statement.

It is obvious that not enough people know about the suffering caused by polio from the beginning of the 20th Century to 1957 (that is the year the Salk Vaccine got widely distributed). It might be hard now to know the terror people felt because of yearly polio outbreaks. Almost everyone knew of (or about someone) who had been left paralyzed by polio. "Patenting the Sun: Polio and the Salk Vaccine" by Jane S. Smith is a good book to read about polio and the work to develop the vaccine.

Barbara Tuchman in her book "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century" starts her book by stating that in the stretch of land between the edge of Europe to the beginning of China 17% of the population died from the Plague. And there were towns and areas with 100% fatalities. And of course then it caused a lot of suffering in Europe.

People shouldn't forget about the 1918 Flu Epidemic. A Wikipedia article states by 1920 "an estimated 500 million people – then about a third of the world's populations – had been infected in four successive waves."

And of course referring to what is happening now as a tragedy of epic proportions ignores the advantage that we now have because of our scientific knowledge. The health experts and the scientists in the 14th Century did not know what they were dealing with when the Plague hit. And the same thing was true for the 1918 Flu Epidemic. And the early years of the Yellow Fever Epidemic in Panama.