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Should kids use beauty face masks? Dermatologists say no, but a growing number of companies are targeting a new generation of kids who have grown up with TikTok skin care and makeup routines.
The cosmetics industry and parts of the Internet have been in a stir since the launch earlier this month of Renee, a beauty company that caters to children as young as three and is backed by Canadian actress Shay Mitchell.
Its bundle of five children’s hydrating face masks, including “everyday” varieties named Puppy, Panda, and Unicorn, sells for about $35 on its website.
Another growing US-based brand, Evergreen, sells products such as face-mists, toners and moisturizers for pre-teens and claims annual sales of more than $100 million.
Fifteen-year-old American YouTuber Salish Matter unveiled her brand Sincerely Yours in October, at a launch event at a New Jersey mall attended by thousands of people and a police force.
“Children’s skin does not require cosmetics other than the daily hygiene products toothpaste and shower gel, and sun cream when exposed,” said Laurence Coiffard, a researcher at the University of Nantes in France who co-directs the Cosmetics Watch website.
Hair-focused beauty products are part of a broader society-wide trend.
Many girls in Gen Alpha, the marketing term for young people born between 2010 and 2024, are adopting skin care, makeup and hair routines that are more typical of older teens or their mothers.
The most precocious ones are known as “Sephora kids”, a reference to the popular French beauty retailer as they seek to imitate popular TikTok or YouTube influencers, some of whom are as young as seven years old.
Coiffard cited research showing that children who use adult cosmetics and creams have a higher risk of developing skin allergies in later life, as well as exposure to endocrine disruptors and phytoestrogens that can disrupt hormonal development.
– ‘get ready with me’ –
Molly Hales, an American dermatologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, spent several months on TikTok as a 13-year-old girl interested in beauty routines.
After creating a profile and liking several videos made by minors, the Chinese-owned site’s algorithms “saturated” her and fellow researcher Sarah Rigali.
The two watched a total of 100 videos from 82 different profiles.
In one, a child applied 14 different products to his face before developing a burning rash.
Another showed a girl waking up at 4:30 a.m. to complete her skin-care and makeup routine before school.
The most popular video was titled “Get Ready with Me”, which featured an average of six different products, often including adult anti-aging creams, with an average combined cost of $168.
“I was shocked by what I was seeing in these videos, especially the number of products these girls were using,” Hales told AFP.
Their research was published in the American journal Pediatrics in June.
Many “disproportionately represented” brands, such as Glow, Drunk Elephant or The Ordinary, market themselves as healthy, supposedly natural alternatives to chemical-laden competitors.
The top 25 most viewed videos analyzed by Hales included products containing an average of 11 and a maximum of 21 potentially irritating active ingredients for children’s skin.
– ‘Not necessary’ –
The motivation for new hair brands like Renee, Evergreen or St. Crew is that they are orienting teens and tweens towards more suitable options.
“Children are naturally curious and instead of ignoring it, we can embrace it with safe, gentle products parents can trust,” Rini co-founder Michelle tells her 35 million Instagram followers.
Helms stated that she had “mixed feelings” about the emergence of this trend, saying that there was a potential benefit of providing less harmful products to young girls.
But they “are not really necessary” and “perpetuate the expectation of a certain standard of beauty, or taking care of skin health and beauty using a very expensive and time-intensive daily routine”, he said.
“These products risk taking girls away from better uses of their time, money and effort,” she said.
Pierre Vabres, a member of the French Society of Dermatology, believes there is also a harmful psychological effect of involving children in beauty routines and then trying to sell them products.
“This risks giving children a false, even sexist, image of themselves, in which they are ‘miniature adults’ who need to think about their appearance in order to feel good,” she told reporters in Paris this month.
ADP-CRA/TGB/JJ
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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