Parents, your preteen girls skincare fetish is harming her body, mind and soul

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 o...