Distinguishing a 'Visillera' from a Humble Girl in Consumption Habits

From the Gas Test to 50 Pairs of Shoes

In a small-town bar, a couple in their early twenties, newly independent, share a table with neighbors. He has just peine a workshop, with no brand or safety net behind it. She doesn't work. And in the middle of the conversation, she tells the waitress she's looking at €160 boots. The scene, witnessed by a patron, summarizes a question that reappears periodically: how to distinguish a visillera (a Spanish term for someone who spends ostentatiously beyond their means) from a humble girl in their consumption? The problem is that spending, unlike income, is not declared on any tax form.

The Ant Spending and the Phrases That Betray It

The first recurring sign is small, constant spending. Clothes, shoes, and makeup add up in doses that anyone can afford individually; multiplied by an entire wardrobe, they no longer do. Someone recounted finding over 50 pairs of shoes in an ex-partner's closets and almost having a heart attack. What's revealing isn't the individual item. It's the sum.

There are a handful of phrases that act as an early warning. "I have nothing to wear." "It's out of fashion." "It's for transitional weather." "It's not the same shade of brown." Each one justifies a new purchase; chained together, they paint a pattern. And a pattern, like any pattern, is more reliable than the detail that composes it.

The indication isn't what is spent. It's the inability to be content with what one already has.

The Gas Test and Other Field Trials

The most cited method is also the most debated: asking the price of a liter of gasoline. A veteran proposed it as a quick filter—whoever doesn't know it by heart, he implied, is a visillera—and the response was swift. She doesn't drive. She doesn't pay for gasoline. Why should she know that price and not the price of sanitary pads or birth control pills, which do affect her? There the thermometer falters.

Other tests have better press. Choosing a restaurant and observing whether one looks at the menu or the price first. Passing by a dumpster and measuring the reaction: positive, thrifty; negative, the opposite. Going to IKEA and seeing the expression among the aisles. Asking if one knows how to sew and make their own clothing alterations, the female equivalent of a man knowing how to fix things around the house.

The list is long because everyone defends their own method. No one trusts their neighbor's thermometer.

The Income/Expense Ratio, the Metric Almost No One Disputes

If anything unifies disparate positions, it's the ratio between what comes in and what goes out. Someone reduced it to two words, income/expense ratio, and it became the standard. An isolated purchase says nothing: there are handbags over €100 that only come out for weddings and have 15 years of life; there are shoes for €400 bought at 21 and used until 41. The whole picture says something, not the individual piece.

The problem with the ratio is that it requires talking about money, and there, almost no one is honest. Visible consumption is the surface. Real income is the hidden depth. Comparing someone else's label with one's own salary is the favorite, and most sterile, pastime of any dinner table conversation.

The Double Standard: There Are 'Visilleros' Too

The conversation drifted, not by chance, to the flip side. Some argue that the term has a male version and that no one uses it with the same venom: the one who judges someone else's car, neighborhood, or brand of clothing. The symmetry isn't perfect. Those who bring up the price of someone else's wallet usually carry their own considerably more heavily loaded than they appear.

Around the middle of the exchange, nuances appeared. Some said that young people from small towns go to study with their parents' allowance. Others said that men also prolong adolescence. The shared conclusion, for once, was that the problem isn't gender but timing: each generation suspects that the next one spends worse than the previous one.

The Wedding Changes Everything

And then there's the most bitter thesis, which holds that the difference between a humble person and a visillera is measured until the wedding day. Afterward, it's argued, the rules change on their own, and past behavior says nothing about the future. The only quantified credit that appears in the whole affair is one for €20,000 to renovate a kitchen, with plans already to change the flooring. That it appears as a warning rather than a description says a lot about the atmosphere.

In the end, skepticism wins. Outside of very obvious cases, it's concluded, no one truly knows who they share a bed with, let alone who they share a bank account with. Clothes are visible. Accounting is not.

With 116 responses under its belt, the initial question—how to distinguish a visillera from a humble girl—remains without a definitive answer. Most people trust they can deduce someone's spending from their shoes. Most of the time, they are wrong.