Waitresses’ facial cosmetics and tipping: A field experiment

It had been found that cosmetics do improve female facial attractiveness when judgments were made based on photographs. However, these studies were conducted only on laboratory and field studies are scarce in the literature and none of them have tested the effect of customers’ behavior. An experiment was carried out in restaurant in order to verify if waitresses’ makeup is associated with an increase in patrons’ tipping behavior. Female waitresses with and without makeup were instructed to act in the same way than usual with their patrons. Results showed that the makeup condition was associated with a significant increase in tipping behavior of the male customers.