Picture the scene: it’s 1996, you’re 12 and going for a Saturday night sleepover at a friend’s house. First, you head to the high street together for bath bombs and penny sweets from Woolworths. You go home to watch Speed, rented from the video shop (despite it being a 15), paint your nails, badly, with glittery Spectacular nail varnish, and spray yourselves with O2 Impulse while you look up boys you fancy in the phone book. Life is, dare I say it, good?
This mundane yet comforting tweenage- hood is familiar to most Millennials – hence why nostalgic social media accounts peddling videos of Body Shop fruit soaps and Mizz magazine covers now go viral, as well as the success of US TV series PEN15, which charted the embarrassing escapades of brace-wearing teens (actually played by 30-somethings Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle). For our generation the tween years were both a painful storm of puberty, embarrassment and self-consciousness and a blissful bubble of first crushes and the kind of intense friendships you perhaps never experience the like of again.
Our consumption of fashion and make-up was mostly limited to wanting a pair of combat trousers after seeing All Saints on Top Of The Pops, or using a red hair mascara to try to emulate Ginger Spice. The beauty of it was, you weren’t quite yet full-blown teenagers; you could still step backwards and envelope yourselves in childlike wonder and silliness and forget all about trying to be cool.
So what are today’s tweens, aka Gen Alpha, doing with their awkward years? If TikTok is to be believed, they’re mini-influencers, consumed by skincare routines and filming GRWM (get ready with me) videos. In December, #ChristmasHaul videos on TikTok showed pre-teens revealing the vast amounts of skincare they’d received, with Drunk Elephant, Sol De Janeiro, Fenty, Glow Recipe and Dior the most coveted brands.
Meanwhile, the hashtag ‘#KidsatSephora, referring to the huge US make-up chain, now has millions of views, featuring videos of young girls ransacking the aisles and using up testers after school as they rush to nab the latest viral must-have. Drunk Elephant has emerged as the trophy brand for the ‘Sephora teens’, so much so they even offer ‘Mama and Cub’ gift boxes designed for both mother and daughter. And the social media trend is driving a spike in sales. Annual spend on toiletries and cosmetics by UK children aged 10 to 18 increased to £709m in 2021, the Kids Insights Global Health & Beauty report found.
TikTok influencer Chloe VanBerkel summed up what many feel about this when, before Christmas, she recounted seeing a tween demanding a specific concealer in Sephora. The caption to her video asked, ‘Is the next generation growing up too fast?’ It certainly feels so. A friend with two teenage daughters tells me, ‘This is an issue all my friends are talking about. My daughter is 13 and at 12 she began a multi-step skincare routine involving lotions, potions, hyaluronic acids, scrubs, peels, masks and oils. All her friends are obsessed with “It” brands and they’ll regularly ask for £50 face creams for birthdays or Christmas.’
Beauty expert Nadine Baggott says she is ‘truly horrified’ by the development. ‘While we should acknowledge that children go through puberty much younger than we did, and so are prone to oilier skin and breakouts, that doesn’t mean they need retinol, peptides, sheet masks and super-strength acids. All a pre-teen needs is a gentle rinse-off cleanser twice a day with a washcloth, a super-light SPF lotion and an on-the-spot gel for occasional breakouts. Everything else is marketing hype.’
A lot of fingers have been pointing at TikTok and specifically influencers whose GRWM routines these tweens are exposed to thousands of times a week on the app. It’s a lifestyle Gen Z is desperate to emulate, with a recent survey revealing that 57% of them are interested in a career in social media influencing; with Gen Alpha looking set to follow in their footsteps.
Those numbers fly in the face of the fact that we know social media is having an adverse effect on young girls’ mental health. A report by Harvard researchers last year detailed that exposure to videos and photos on social media platforms can ‘contribute to body dissatisfaction and eating disorders among teen and adolescent girls, and can lead to serious mental health issues, including suicidal behaviour’.
Consumerism and the billions of pounds’ worth of entirely unnecessary skincare aside, it is worrying, and depressing, to see girls so desperate to grow up at double speed. There’s a reason why films such as 13 Going On 30 and Never Been Kissed left such a lasting pop culture legacy. It’s an era and an age so many of us wish we could go back to despite all of its awkward, gangly, spotty and insecure bits.
Maybe, because we were still full of wonder and optimism, life was in front of us, and we hadn’t yet mapped anything out. Now things are different – your every moment is photographed, videoed and documented on social media in a way we never experienced, creating a sense of acute pressure on how you feel about your looks that is perhaps inevitable.
But it still feels like Sephora tweens might be skipping a seminal part of childhood in their rush to grow up.