It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jessica DeFino transformed my relationship with skincare. After reading her newsletter, The Review of Beauty, I started questioning the purported “anti-aging” benefits of the products I was putting on my face and asked myself what it meant to buy into a philosophy of “anti-aging” in the first place. DeFino has probably saved me thousands of dollars on skincare.
I am, however, aging. The newest target audience for beauty advertising is decades younger than me: the teens, tweens, and even younger kids flocking to brands like Evereden. And despite some movement toward body positivity since I was a teenager, it feels like young people are growing up in a world with more exacting beauty standards than ever, from viral challenges that pressure them to work on their bodies all the time to ultra-normalized plastic surgery to weird ideas about guys’ eyelashes. To be young today is to be bombarded with a dizzying variety of messages about your own beauty or ugliness, coming from some of the world’s biggest companies as well as from influencers who are ostensibly your peers.
To help me unpack all this, I reached out to DeFino, who got her start as an editor on the Kardashian-Jenner beauty apps, then became disillusioned with the beauty industry and evolved into one of its most incisive and influential critics. In a conversation that has been condensed and edited, she and I talked about MAGA beauty, the potential harms of slathering your skin with retinol at age 8, and why helping young people push back against our disordered beauty culture has to start with examining our own anxieties.
Kids’ interest in skincare is often portrayed as fun or harmless, DeFino told me. But beauty “is a multibillion-dollar industry that is built on insecurity, whose physical products and procedures often have very serious physical consequences, whose messaging has very serious psychological consequences,” she said. “We must take it seriously.”
How common is it for kids to be using skincare products that once would have been marketed to adults? And how big of a business is skincare for young people?
It’s a huge business right now. US households with 6- to 12-year-olds spent 27 percent more on skincare in 2023 versus the year before. Beauty spending among teens increased 23 percent year over year. I don’t have this year’s statistics in front of me, but I would say it’s a very powerful growth sector for the industry.
More brands that were formerly targeted toward adults are expanding to target teens and tweens. And at the same time, we have a lot more beauty brands entering the market that are specifically meant for infants, babies, tweens, teenagers. A year or two ago, Dior launched the Dior baby lines, which included skincare and perfume for babies. I swipe through TikTok or Instagram, and I will see mothers putting sheet masks on their 1-year-old babies, 2-year-old toddlers.
There’s this really interesting trend that started a while ago on TikTok, where moms will hand their babies different beauty products and see if they know intuitively what to do with them. It is fascinating to see these 1-, 2-, 3-year-olds know exactly what to do with the blush brush or a serum or eyebrow pencil.
Why has this been happening? Why are we seeing these expansions into younger markets?
First of all, I think the collapse of age-appropriate spaces and age-appropriate media has been a huge factor. Just speaking from personal experience, growing up, there were a lot of teen- and tween-focused magazines. There were TV channels where the shows and the commercials were geared towards a specific age group.
As media collapses and everything moves online and more into social media, we’re all hanging out in the same spaces. It’s very easy for a child to get adult content on their “For You” page. And it’s very easy for adults to be fed this teen and tween content to get outraged about.
How many stories were there about the Sephora tweens? Which really only fed the trend.
There’s also basic everyday capitalism: The market always needs to expand. In the past couple of years, especially, we’ve seen it expand not only to children, but to women who are 70 and 80, who are getting these full-body makeover routines. We’re seeing more and more young boys and men becoming interested in cosmetic interventions as well. This is not only a phenomenon for young girls. The market is really saturating every demographic right now.
Filters on social media are created with cultural beauty standards in mind. Young girls might not necessarily be conscious of the fact that, like, I want to look younger, so I’m going to be using retinol or anti-aging creams. But they might be saying, I want to look just like that filter, and that filter is created with standards that prioritize looking very smooth, no lines, no wrinkles, no pores. I think the AI beauty standard and the standard of anti-aging actually share a lot of surface-level qualities.
What are the medical or physical implications of using a lot of skincare, especially with active ingredients like retinoids, if you’re super young?
There are a ton of potential physical consequences the more beauty products you are putting on your face, and that goes for all ages, but especially for younger people whose skin is still developing and can be more vulnerable to potential issues.
This new study from Northwestern Medicine looked at the skincare routines of children and teens on TikTok, specifically ages 7 to 18, and how those might damage their skin long term. There’s an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients in the skincare routines in these videos, and some potential consequences of that are making the skin more sensitive to sunlight, which of course increases your risk of skin cancer over time; allergies; and dermatitis, which is an inflammatory condition. Any inflammation that can arise from that can also trigger psoriasis, rosacea, eczema, acne.
Anything that you put on your skin affects the environment of bacteria that actually is there to keep the skin safe and healthy and functioning. Interfering with the skin barrier and the microbiome by layering on product after product after product can — for anyone of any age — make you dry or oily or dehydrated or sensitized. But particularly in the case of babies, there have been studies linking the overuse of soaps and scented products to developing eczema that carries on throughout a child’s whole life.
What about the psychological and emotional aspects being initiated into this skincare industrial complex from a young age?
The most basic place to start is just to look at the data that we have for how beauty standards affect everyone who is subject to them. We have really strong data that shows that the pressure to adhere to a particular appearance ideal increases instances of appearance-related anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, obsessive product use and overuse, self-harm, and even suicide. Personally, I think the risks are even higher when you are indoctrinated into beauty culture at younger ages. The psyche is still as vulnerable as the skin is at that point. The younger you internalize a lesson like, I must look XYZ way in order to be beautiful, the harder it is to challenge that later in life.
I also think a lot of it reinforces gender essentialism and these ideas of traditional femininity and traditional masculinity that have other sorts of consequences beyond one’s own psychological health. These reinforce the conditions of a very oppressive society that believes women should act one way and look one way, and if you don’t, you’re not good, or you’re not a woman, or you’re not living up to your biological destiny.
Since you brought up gender roles, I’m sure you’ve seen the discourse around MAGA beauty and conservative “chic.” I’m curious if you think some of these politicized beauty standards are trickling down to young people.
I do, and I don’t actually think that’s out of the ordinary. What we’re seeing in, for example, Evie, which is sort of a right-leaning women’s magazine, these are the lessons that are embedded in all sorts of mainstream beauty culture, whether a brand is coded as conservative or liberal. It’s hitting in a different way now that conservatives are saying this out in the open, but these conservative messages are sort of the hidden messages in almost all beauty content that suggests you should look different than the way you currently look in order to be beautiful or healthy or happy or worthy.
If outrage about Sephora tweens just feeds into more marketing, what is a good social response to some of the trends that we’re seeing?
When we see our adult behaviors mirrored back to us by children, we can see some of the absurdity of it, and we can see some of the danger of it. I don’t think the correct or useful response is to be like, Okay, we’ve got to stop young girls from doing this. We have to look at ourselves.
We have to look at the adult beauty culture that we have created and we’re participating in and we’re perpetuating. And if we don’t think that is something for a young girl to see or to participate in, we have to be part of the project of dismantling that, not just for young girls, but for all women.
This is a problem for adults to solve, and we’re not going to solve it by pointing and laughing at children and saying, look at how dumb they are. They care about anti-aging because you care about anti-aging, and it’s just as ridiculous when you do it, because you are hurtling toward death. It’s not going to change if you have a few fewer wrinkles.