The unattainable beauty standards which have consistently pervaded women’s lives despite feminist efforts to combat them, are now influencing young girls, known on TikTok as ‘Sephora kids’.
‘Sephora kids’ are notorious on TikTok for clearing shelves of high-end skincare products and leaving behind messy shelves with products strewn around and no longer able to be sold. This is not a phenomenon which is unique to the U.S. as I recently visited a Boots store and found that the majority of the queue consisted of young girls.
However, while such behaviour is unacceptable, we should look deeper into the reason why these young girls feel the need to purchase such expensive beauty products in the first place for which they are not the target market.
In 1990, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, an exposé which interrogated a society where women are constantly pressured to pursue beauty and youthfulness, which functions to oppress them. Yet such feminist critiques of destructive beauty standards evidently have not dismantled them. In 2024, when women in the U.K. are arguably more politically active and the support for feminism continues to increase, we remain entangled in impossible and problematic standards of beauty. These standards have always impacted young girls, yet they appear to be influencing them to a greater extent as they now have direct access to products which promise that this beauty ideal is within reach.
In The Beauty Myth, Wolf argued: “You could see the signs of female ageing as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women to see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old.” The first viewpoint permeates the beauty industry, pushing anti-aging products towards women for profit. According to BBC, “Gen Alpha are busy buying products […] designed to minimise the effects of aging.”
Clearly, the exposure of young girls to rigorous beauty ideals and negativity towards women displaying signs of ageing has resulted in impressionable young girls believing that any visible signs of imperfection should be scrupulously avoided.
Women’s Health reported that the Dove Self-Esteem Project revealed that 9 in 10 children are exposed to toxic beauty content on social media apps, with 1 in 2 children reporting an impact on their mental health because of it. This social media exposure, as well as the targeting of tweens by some beauty brands, is exacerbating the beauty myth, making it even more difficult to combat as it is ingrained from such a young age.
Jessica DeFino, beauty writer and author of of The Unpublishable, told Mashable: “Girls participate in very worrying trends because that's what our culture has created for them […] we have a responsibility as adults to examine that and to try to create a better world for them to exist in.” Yet how do we achieve this?
Ensuring that young girls are better educated about skincare and their own self-worth beyond their outward appearance is crucial. This would involve a wider societal effort, particularly across social media. Limiting exposure to social media could also benefit tweens, as their age makes them particularly impressionable, and will have a long-lasting negative impact. Even encouraging a simpler skincare routine could encourage a more positive relationship between young girls and their appearance and combat the beauty myth which continues to infiltrate women and girls’s self-worth.
Edited by Nicole Collins
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