After my cousin wakes up and brushes her teeth, she immediately gets her face ready for the day. The first step of her routine consists of rubbing her Nivea moisturizer onto her face for a hydrated, softened and glowy feeling. Then she applies her stick sunscreen from ISDIN. After this, she puts key lime pie limb balm from Lush on her lips in order to give them that moisturized and plump feeling. My cousin is ten years old, by the way.
When I was her age, I didn’t know about skincare–but two years later all my friends were suddenly using the Youth to the People’s superfood cleanser. It smelled like vegetables, was really slimy in a way I didn’t like, and would break me out. I bought it anyway and nearly finished the bottle. Only later did I test out other cleansers to find one that worked for me. (I use the Tatcha cleanser now and like it.)
But that’s not how most of my classmates are thinking about skin care products they see on TikTok. They buy things because influencers talk about them, and because the products look cute, even when they might not be necessary or even safe for kids to use. And can you blame them? The Drunk Elephant Lala Moisturizer literally dispenses the product in the shape of a little flower! Cute features like that make it easy to forget that not all of the brand’s products are recommended for tweens at all.
We are now peak tween skin care. Younger influencers, such as Koti and Haven from the @garzacrew, @amyinnewport’s daughter, or @evelyngrwmofficialk, have grown their platforms to millions of viewers by posting their skincare routines, Sephora hauls, and unboxing content. In February, Haven, who is seven years old, posted a get-ready-with-me in which she used numerous Glow Recipe products, including the Cloudberry Bright Essence Toner and the Pomegranate Peptide Firming Serum–“to keep those wrinkles away,” she said.
I remember watching this video and really wanting the serum because of how cool it looked. I didn’t end up buying it because it was $45–and because I realized I didn’t need a product to target “fine lines.” To be fair, Glow Recipe on their website says that they recommend customers start using the serum in their early 20s. (The toner is okay to use for younger customers.)
But this is part of the problem: While a lot of these brands warn that there are certain products that fans under twelve are recommended to stay away from, it’s easy for tweens to get the impression that the brand generally is kid-friendly. Drunk Elephant, for example, posted an Instagram in December with the founder and chief creative officer, Tiffany Masterson, recommending a “simple routine that doesn’t require many products” for kids and tweens.
The other thing we should also be asking ourselves is we’re even being marketed products to target stuff like “glowy skin” at our age. Now if your skin is not glowy, you’re obviously going to think there’s something wrong with you because your skin is not glowy. I remember getting a Sephora gift card for my twelfth birthday and not even knowing what Sephora was. A week later, I went in wanting to buy the Youth to the People cleanser because my friends hyped it up and said it gave you glowy skin. By now, I think glowy skin has become such an unnecessary trend. It gets to a point where your skin actually looks sweaty and greasy.
Seeing silly trends like skincare smoothies and glowy skin blow up online made me start thinking about what these brands owe us in terms of responsibility. I don’t think a Sephora age limit is the answer either. Instead the skin care companies should be responsible for setting an age limit for their brand and sticking to it across all their products. If they are marketing to kids, they should make sure all their products are safe for kids, not just some. And if these companies’ products aren’t safe for kids, then they should signal that by making their products less colorful, less cutesy and overall less appealing to kids.
When my little cousin recently visited she really wanted to go to Ulta to buy the Bubble Slam Dunk moisturizer. I tried it myself last year and while the product looked cute, it didn’t really make a difference to my skin after a few weeks of using it, and so I didn’t buy it again. I said as much to my cousin but she still wanted it. And so even though I wanted to go to Ulta myself, I told my grandpa not to drive us, just so I could keep my cousin from buying it.