In my daughter’s bunk at summer camp this year, she was one of the only girls without a skincare routine.
My daughter isn’t a teenager: She’s only 10.
Her experience was an eye-opening lesson for me about the degree to which the skincare trend has infiltrated the pre-teen female experience. It turns out so many girls age 12 and under have their own Sephora rewards accounts that there’s a term for them among brand aficionados: “Sephora kids.”
The aggressive marketing toward young girls happens mainly on social media, as influencers showcase their daily skincare regimens and brand preferences on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.
But the fad is perpetuated by cosmetics companies eager to cash in on a new generation of customers.
It’s a lucrative market: Young consumers age 14 and under “drove 49% of drug store skin sales” in 2023, the Associated Press has reported, and by some estimates about a third of “prestige” sales at Sephora and similar outlets are now made to households with tweens and teens.
“I know there’s a lot of money in it, because I get offers all the time,” Instagram influencer Chani Malui told me.
“But it’s all unknown chemicals and toxins,” she noted. “It’s not something I would ever promote; there’s no way my daughter will have a budget for skincare.”
Recently a mother on a parenting listserv I’m on solicited mother’s-helper jobs for her 11-year-old to fund the girl’s Sephora skincare shopping trips.
“There are much worse things for her to be obsessed with, so this isn’t a battle I am fighting,” the mom wrote.
Her daughter was too young to independently babysit, but not too young to have an expensive skincare routine.
Pre-teen girls have always had beauty fixations — and that mom is right, there are worse preoccupations than a $70 moisturizer for a child that age.
But the physical consequences of all these potions are significant. The routines being promoted aren’t put together by dermatologists or experts; many of these products are not meant for young, sensitive skin.
As a result, doctors are reporting that girls as young as 8 years old are showing up at their offices with face rashes, chemical burns and other allergic reactions.
Worse, though, is what this new mania represents: a social-media-fueled hyper-fixation on literally every pore of a girl’s skin.
A preoccupation with physical appearance warps a healthy self-image — and is often a precursor to anxiety, depression and eating disorders.
It’s common sense that girls should not be spending a significant amount of their time critiquing their own appearance on an app where every image is enhanced and filtered, and spending their money to “fix” themselves.
Or so you’d think. Yet few parents of my generation are short-circuiting the craze in their homes.
The phenomenon has all the red flags: Social media algorithms are feeding content to emotionally vulnerable young girls about achieving the perfect physical appearance, and corporations are all too happy to cash in.
Grown adults have trouble finding peace when they constantly compare themselves to others on social media; how can children possibly discern what is real and what is Internet-created to ensnare them?
Nobody comes away from spending hours in front of a mirror criticizing her flaws and imperfections feeling more confident, or more pleased with her appearance.
Certainly not a pre-teen girl; that’s for sure.
The message we’re sending to young girls is that in order to be a beautiful woman, they must spend hundreds of dollars and many hours researching and applying the latest dermatological concoctions.
Is it any wonder that an increasing number of them, when they’re also told it’s possible to completely opt out of being female, decide they’d like to do so?
When being a woman involves this expense and this physical and emotional toll, perhaps it’s logical that so many girls are coming to the conclusion that this hyper-feminine version of womanhood isn’t for them.
The teen skincare obsession is a perfect storm of social-media-fueled narcissism and consumerism.
As a parent of a Sephora Kids-aged girl, it’s frustrating that more parents aren’t seeing the glaring downsides of the trend, but are catering to it instead.
My daughter says she never felt peer-pressured to take part in the scrubbing, smoothing and self-judgment at camp — but many other girls, faced with being left out, don’t have the same strength.
Beauty is only skin deep, but social media algorithms are telling our girls that it doesn’t come cheap, financially or emotionally.
It’s time parents wake up to the fact that this preteen fad isn’t precociousness, it’s toxic.
Bethany Mandel is co-author of “Stolen Youth” and a homeschooling mother of six in greater Washington, DC.
https://nypost.com/2024/09/29/opinion/preteen-skincare-fetish-is-harming-our-girls-body-and-soul/
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