psa to diouana women who understand beauty as a currency

for women who spend like courtesans and finally want something in return

hi, my name is diouana and it’s really nice to meet you. you’re recommended to me by some people

it’s fun being a woman, isn’t it? to exist in the in-between. that liminal space between knowing and understanding; where one experiences the pleasure-pain of becoming.

if i’m grateful for anything, it’s that my entrance into womanhood has not been marred with violence. grief, yes. but never violence.

womanhood, for me, has been an initiation. a heroine’s journey of slaying every monster that came for my head. of exorcising every demon that came for my soul.

outside of the sheer audacity of believing myself deserving of a good, more-than-comfortable, life, my guiding principle has always been my perspective. my unrelenting voice; my unwillingness to give up on myself; my commitment to continue to do the work of becoming even more of who i am.

we can all agree that the opposite of self-destruction is self-creation. and i’ve found that the best conduit for self-creation is rooted in fantasy.

fantasy gets its start in mythmaking; which finds itself emerging in the keeping steady of the small details; which lends itself to having a memory long enough to never forget minute matters.

to make one’s myth is to be principally concerned with telling the world who we are, and not the other way around.

that said, there are limitations. there always are.

the world may not care, or even affirm, your reality. and that’s quite alright. it’s better to live in one’s own world, so long as one maintains a dialogue with reality.

returning to fantasy, i find it to be the domain of the feminine. i do not mean to say that only women can create fantasy. after all, history knows many great men who knew a thing or two about putting on a show. my view is that fantasy, and its creation, comes best, and easily, to those who venerate the feminine spirit; who honor her teachings; who walk alongside her descendants.

and so, i find myself within the domain of the feminine as a student of fantasy. as a woman entranced by the concept of erotic capital and how women just like me wield it. if they wield it at all.

before we move on, i should tell you that although i love womanhood and its textures, i understand if you do not. i understand if you find it oppressive, painful and disorienting. i understand if you find yourself alienated from it, not because you are not a woman, but because you do not meet certain gendered expectations. whatever those may be for you. i understand, and i invite you to get lost within the feminine labyrinth even still. fantasy can upended even the strictest of expectations and that’s the fun part. so if the feminine domain is not your home despite your birthright, make your home in your own myth.

introducing…diouana womanomics

my myth is that of a founder-scholar. an erotic capital economist. a macro strategist for the divine feminine. this myth is the result of my taking seriously one thing that has encircled me my whole life: beauty.

not beauty as superficial pursuit, but beauty as a material fact in the economic lives of women.

when we discuss beauty, we often talk standards, hierarchies, and assumptions. but i’m not interested in that line of thinking. as i said, fantasy is what i traffic in.

i’m more interested in how much women are spending into beauty. their hair, their nails, their full body waxes, their makeup, their hydrafacials. everything!

how much does it cost for you to create your myth? and what is your myth costing you?

to the laywoman, these sound like the same question but they’re not. let me give you an example:

the above is a screen grab from my web app, diouana womanomics, which is the world’s first feminine financial identity platform rooted in jungian psychoanalysis and modern portfolio theory. it’s a female-focused behavioral finance field study masquerading as a beauty expense tracker.

at the time of my latest entries, which date to may 2025, i had spent since the beginning of 2025, $2,933 on beauty related purchases. this is what i meant when i asked, “how much does it cost for you to create your myth?”

now, if you look to the right of the screen grab, you’ll see that my web app, diouana womanomics, calculated exactly how much i could have in 10 years if i spent 50% less than what i did and invested the different. this came out to $50,764; which, at the time of publishing, is enough for me to buy 2 mini kellys! this is what i meant when i asked, “what is your myth costing you?”

my myth costs $2,933, but it’s costing me $50,764 in the long run.

the first number seems innocuous, especially for a 5-month period, but the second number makes a difference if one cares about female financial independence.

and isn’t that the name of the game? the ability, as a woman, to walk away from any situation that does not serve us? please us? make us happy, feel seen, and secure?

money makes the difference. and $50k is a head start in an emergency fund.

but the purpose of the web app, diouana womanomics, isn’t to shame you into spending less on beauty, but to illuminate to you who you are in relation to your beauty spending habits. using jungian psychoanalysis, i devised an assessment that each user takes in order to discover their primary, secondary, and shadow archetype. as you can see, my primary is the lover, followed by the maiden, and my shadow is the sage:

if i could sum up my archetypes, it would be through the moniker of ingénue. which is befitting as i’m still a woman becoming. maybe i’ll always be.

all of this is fun, if not a bit fluffy (expect for that opportunity cost calculator, that’s pure math!) and you may find yourself asking, “why does this matter?”

it matters because no one takes what women do seriously. not even women.

do you remember those statistics we found in that diouana woman livestream from february 2025? the one i referenced again in my essay about the societal fear, and disrespect, of beautiful women:

“i told you that beauty should be a footnote in your story and only mentioned after the fact. that is my diouana woman take.

but let us consider, if not accept, the beauty culture in consumerist america.

let us also consider that in 2022-2023 alone, single american women between the ages of 25 to 34 spent $1.3 billion on personal care products and services, inclusive of makeup and skincare.

the second largest category of spenders for this line item were single american women between the ages of 35 to 44 who spent $857 million, followed by single american women under the age of 25 who spent $777 million.

collectively, the highest categories of unmarried female spenders contributed $2.9 billion worth of consumption on personal care products and services in 2022-2023.

now, compare these figures to single american men of the same age groups:

the highest category of spenders remained the same, single american men between the ages of 25 to 34 spent $532 million in 2022-2023 on personal care products and services, likely inclusive of makeup and skincare.

the second largest category of spenders for this line item were single american men between the ages of 45 to 54 who spent $373 million, followed by single american men between the ages of 35 to 44 who spent $335 million.

collectively, the highest categories of unmarried male spenders contributed $1.2 billion worth of consumption on personal care products and services in 2022-2023.

readers should note that when compared to their unmarried gen z counterparts, single american men under the age of 25 spent $262 million on personal care products and services that same year. this represents a 66.2% gap in spending.

when i’ve done a more robust and rigorous analysis of these figures, and those of earlier years, i will present you a white paper detailing my findings on the microeconomics of female erotic capital expenditure (basically analyzing erotic capital as an economic force) as it relates to american beauty culture and the gendered wealth gap on asset terms (so not how much money women and men make in terms of salary, but how much they have invested, respectively). this research, and its iterations, will be aptly titled diouana womanomics.

but for now, glossing over these numbers, it’s undeniable that unmarried women, gen z at least, spend far more on beauty. approximately $515 million dollars more.”

the economic force of erotic capital is unparalleled. i reckon, it’s on par with the S&P 500 on a returns basis. meaning, it is my hypothesis that not only are women spend an incredible amount of money on beauty, but some women are receiving outsized returns for their efforts.

i have another hypothesis that women spend like courtesans but do not receive like courtesans. meaning, women, at least american unmarried generation z women, spend half a billion dollars more on beauty than their male counterparts, but do not have nearly as much as them in savings or investments. considering the retirement crisis within the united states, it’s not hyperbolic to assume women will bare the brunt of this. and consider that it has been said “motherhood is the single greatest predictor of poverty for women,” women having their own financial security, irrespective of husbands, boyfriends, suitors, or lovers, is very, very important.

now that i’ve scared you, let’s take this back to beauty.

diouana women understand beauty as a currency. but like all smart investors, diouana women understand how to diversify our portfolios. in this case, i will continue my monthly full-body waxes at ~$230 a session but i will not partake in eyelash extensions which require, at least in my city, $200 refills every 2-3 weeks. this is my version of girl math. not financial illiteracy wrapped up in baby pale pink. but fiscal responsibility that still honors my erotic capital.

i know money is not the sexiest thing to talk about, when you actually have to talk about it, but understanding how to finance your erotic capital with your hard-earned cash is. it’s not sexy to be bad with money, but it is erotic to always have cash flow. diouana womanomics keeps you on track.

now, something i’m also keen on researching, my so called research within my field research, is what kind of financial returns women are actually receiving from their erotic capital.

if you look at my return-on-investment analysis within diouana womanomics, you’ll see that the majority of my “returns” from my beauty purchases have all been psychological! literally just confident boosts. which is fine and dandy. but remember, these confidence boosts are costing me $50,764 in opportunity costs via the money i am not investing, and growing, in the stock market but instead spending at sephora.

let’s say i was a woman whose return-on-investment profile showed that i was actually receiving cash-on-cash returns¹. meaning, that my beauty expenses were actually creating wealth for me. what would that look like?

well, this is where the wisdom of whores comes in. for the purposes of the study, i call it the diouana woman inter-relational wealth matrix and it’s housed in the divine feminine economics page of my web app, diouana womanomics. basically, it’s a bloomberg-terminal style dashboard that when enough data becomes available, it will map which exact archetypes (e.g., the lover, the sage, the maiden, etc) have the most wealth transfer inter-relationally. meaning, which archetypal women are actually able to convert their erotic capital into legitimate wealth. be it through the receival of stocks, jewelry, vintage handbags, real estate!

it has been said that the taj mahal was built as a gift to a woman². this study is the world’s first attempt to quantify what it means for a women to inspire that level of devotion. if not, gift-giving.

from the golden state, with love…

yesterday, i received word i had been accepted into graduate school for a masters of science in applied data science³. the proper african daughter i am, i promptly whatsapp’d my mother to tell her the good news.

i studied french literature at harvard. a consequence of my attending le modéle noir exhibition while studying abroad in paris. i began my career on wall street in financial institutions investment banking, an endeavor i do not recommend unless your dream is to suffer under tyrannical sycophantic workaholics, and throughout that experience one thing became clear to me:

1. i was never meant to be an investment banker

2. no one takes beautiful women seriously

c’est dommage, mais ce la vie.

i would never have been able to imagine, let only conjure up, an idea as exciting and provocative as diouana womanomics had it not been for the hell i endured. i would have never had the confidence to pursue it all the way to a filing with the trademark office had it not been for this platform, diouana woman.

i’ve spoken about diouana before, the main character from ousmane sembène’s la noire de…, but i’ve never made the connection, to you, between her and us.

diouana was a woman who was promised the world by her employers. bravely, she left the safety and familiarity of dakar to begin a life in france, making a living taking care of the children of the french family that had lured her from her home.

diouana was lied to, and then made to feel inferior. she was mistreated, and that mistreatment was made to feel as the status quo because of the power differential between her and her employer.

diouana refused to live the life of a slave, and so she went to the afterlife.

in creating this platform, my aim was to resurrect diouana and honor her female spirit of freedom-seeking, glamour-loving, intellectual sensuality that dreams of endless nights spent in the south of france with an emotionality that is deeply rooted in a west african aesthetic—thereby combining an old world with an even older one.

diouana is me. diouana is you. diouana is us.

she’s every woman that has every been made to feel as if she is worthless. every woman that has ever been made to feel bad for wanting more. every woman that has every been punished for seeking better. greater. higher.

if you are a woman who values your erotic capital, do not be ashamed of that fact. it’s yours and yours alone. it’s the portal between your physical manifestation and the essence of your soul. it’s your erotic, in the words of audre lorde.

diouana womanomics was created to legitimatize that erotic in the language of capital because erotic capital is the economic language of the divine feminine.

cosmetics heir leonard lauder’s lipstick theory “suggests that consumers will spend more on small, affordable luxury items like lipstick during economic downturns or when faced with financial uncertainty.”

diouana womanomics is to be the world’s first macroeconomic dataset on erotic capital to prove lauder undeniably, and quantitatively, correct! but not through focus groups or the rise, or fall, of stock prices neither of us care to track, but through the expenses, experiences, and energetics of women like you and me.

it’s an ambitious project, but a diouana woman is nothing, if not, ambitious.

sweet dreams,
a diouana woman

disclaimer: the views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any employer, past or current.

p.s. watch my video essay on “the wisdom of whores | women, patriarchy, and love”

1. measures actual cash received vs. cash invested.

2. there’s an essay to be written about how fealty, not finance, is the hallmark of enduring relationships. that said, money helps!

3. we love black women in stem!