When I was 14, my skincare routine consisted of splashing my face with water, rubbing it briskly on a towel and occasionally smearing some Clean & Clear blackhead clearing cleanser over my nose. To complete the beauty regime, I might have sprayed some Impulse body spray and inadvertently turned my hair orange by misapplying Sun-In (don’t judge, this was the noughties).
It’s a far cry from the beauty regimes some teenage girls are practicing today. Recently, a 14-year-old girl went viral on TikTok for sharing her multi-step, anti-ageing skincare routine, which includes using retinol twice a day and taping a piece of paper to a car window on long journeys to ‘block most of the UV rays’. The post, in which she says she started doing most of these things aged 12, first appeared on Twitter, where it received over 7.1 million views.
It might seem shocking, but she’s not the only one, and in recent years we’ve seen an outpouring of young people on TikTok and Instagram showing off skincare routines that would make Gwyneth Paltrow’s seven-step morning regimen pale in comparison. It’s a dramatic shift away from the way young people behaved even 15-years-ago.
I’m not suggesting my teenage ritual was one to be copied, or by any means the right way. But it was a lot less bleak, when you consider what it says about today’s society that 14-year-olds are already worrying about ageing. But then, growing up, I wasn’t exposed to infinite images of supposedly flawless faces and bodies on social media every day as they are today.
Sure, we saw airbrushed images of celebrities on the covers of magazines, but today’s teenagers are living in an age of filters and Facetune; when editing a picture of yourself to perfection of you chilling at a friend’s house on a Sunday night is the norm. In the noughties, we saw the odd Clearasil advert on TV. Today, many on Instagram and TikTok are bombarded with everything from makeup tutorials and wellness fads to influencers arranging their beauty cabinet full of dozens of expensive products, and this content can be the first thing they see in the morning and the last thing before going to sleep.
Crucially, teenage girls preoccupied with their looks are not to blame here - this obsession with appearance is an indictment of our ageist society. Social media has turbo charged our fixation with looking young. Numerous studies have found that social mediahas had a negative impact on some girls’ mental health regarding issues such as body image and self-esteem, as they feel pressure to look a certain way and compare themselves to the hundreds of posts they scroll past each day.
For all the progress we think we’ve made when it comes to speaking out about the lack of older women on our screens, this shows how far we still have to go. If children think they have to begin an anti-aging routine at an age where they probably still have pocket money and a curfew, the responsibility lies on us as adults to make clear they’re perfect as they are.
It’s the nadir of capitalism to let young people believe they need to spend money on beauty products to improve their appearance. What kind of society do we live in if we’re sending children the message that, despite not being fully grown, they’re already not good enough as they are.
It’s perhaps understandable that women succumb to it when they’re older because it’s hard to escape a society which places a massive premium on youth. If it makes some people feel better about themselves then fine, but it’s a different ballgame when it’s teenagers.
They should be able to enjoy their childhood instead of fixating on the fact that, one day, they won't look young anymore.