Life is shit, so sometimes we treat ourselves to something a little out of our price range. A pair of Bottega mules to ease the pain of eternal suffering? Of course! A Prada bag to hold when those cold winter months come creeping in? Obviously. We have long believed that buying something expensive can give us a little boost.

According to a study conducted by Boston College and Harvard Business, this is actually quite far from the truth. Reported in the Guardian, the report explains that buying luxury items can actually make us feel worse about ourselves, as it can result in feelings of inauthenticity.

“Luxury consumption can be a double-edged sword,” the report outlines. “While luxury consumption yields status benefits, it can also make consumers feel inauthentic because consumers perceive it as an undue privilege.”

So although that Balenciaga hoodie or Loewe throw might impress your fancy fashion friends, the personal consequence of forking out £725 on a blanket you’re too scared to even use in case you spill your pesto pasta on it, can in fact lead to a notion of impostor syndrome.

“(People experience) a dissonance between what luxury represents and who they truly are,” Nailya Ordabayeva, the study’s author and associate professor of marketing at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management told the Guardian. “We call that the impostor syndrome of luxury consumption.”

There is, however, hope for some. Those with high levels of entitlement were found to have their feelings of authenticity less pronounced. Which, actually, explains quite a lot. “People who felt they deserve the best things in life were the only group of individuals with lower feelings of inauthenticity,” Ordabayeva says.

And, although the report acknowledges points at which buying something expensive could be beneficial, such as outfit to wear to a job interview to impress your potential employer, the question of ‘is this really me though?’ just became a lot more deep.