I was browsing through Sephora the other day when I overheard a little girl — who looked to be about the age of my sixth grader, so approximately 11 or 12 — ask the sales associate where she could find a chemical peel. A chemical peel. For her gorgeous, smooth-skinned, cherubic little face. A woman who was presumably her mother stood by, clutching a basket of goodies that I got the impression were mainly for her daughter, not her.
Now look, I’m not saying a little exfoliation isn’t fine; after all, I spent the whole of the ’90s sloughing off copious amounts of skin with that gritty St. Ives walnut scrub we all used. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having an (age-appropriate) skincare routine — the skin is the largest and most sensitive organ in the human body, and you’ve got to take care of it. But if you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve heard of the skincare obsession that’s taking over. Tweens and teens are unboxing Sephora hauls on TikTok and spending hundreds of dollars on products meant for people who actually have wrinkles — not people who won’t be developing them for a good 20 years. They are worried about fine lines at an age when the only thing they should be worrying about is … well, being a kid.
The trend has gotten so out of hand that even summer camps are banning luxury skincare products, according to Business Insider. Per the publication, a letter to parents from Camp Canadensis in the Poconos this year read, “While nail polish and sheet masks in limited quantities can be a fun activity sprinkled into downtime at camp, we want to avoid ‘playing with skincare and cosmetics’ becoming an activity.” Similarly, Maine’s Somerset Camp for Girls directed that their campers “DO NOT need perfume, a daily six-step skincare routine, or excessive amounts of makeup.” The director of Tyler Hill Camp in Pennsylvania stipulated that kids are “supposed to get down and dirty, not spend their time slathering on face cream.” And the list goes on. One mom quoted in the article said the skincare craze among her 9-year-old daughter’s friend group is “out of control,” noting, “It’s everything: retinol serums, masks, hyaluronic acids, eye creams. I’ve seen them come over with cosmetic bags full of every single expensive product that I wouldn’t even pay for myself, like $40 blushes and Dior lip oil.”
When very young girls are balking at trading in their bougie products and complicated routines for a few weeks of just being a kid at summer camp, you know it’s bad. But I’m afraid the issue will have long-term repercussions far after summertime is over. These girls may face a bigger problem than a few wrinkles someday, and I say that as someone who knows.
As a tween and teen in the ’90s, I may not have had access to social media like today’s girls do, but I had my beloved teen magazines whose glossy pages idealized the stick-thin “waif” body type a la Kate Moss. “Heroin chic,” they called it. And I had a mom who, though she meant well, actively encouraged thinness because she too was entrenched in diet culture, thanks in part to her mother. We did Richard Simmons’ “Deal-a-Meal” diet together when I was just 7 or 8. We bonded over workouts (for which I proudly donned my leotards and leg warmers), and she taught me how to read labels, count fat grams, monitor portion sizes, and make the low fat/low calorie version of every dinner we ate. There’s a term for that these days: “Almond Mom.”
I can’t lay the blame squarely on her shoulders, though. It isn’t one singular thing that doomed me; rather, it was a poisonous cocktail of many ingredients — my almond mom, the magazines, the societal messages that fat was the enemy and that being fat was unacceptable — and a young, impressionable mind. Because of that, I have spent the majority of my life loathing my body, anguished at each dimple and every “extra” pound. This body has carried me through life thus far with excellent health; it carried and nurtured four children, and even in middle age is physically stronger than it’s ever been before — but instead of feeling proud of that, I struggle to see past the number on the scale. I live in a world where my self-worth is directly tied to my weight. I know it shouldn’t be that way — logically, rationally, I know — but I cannot disentangle the two, no matter how hard I’ve tried throughout the years.
The last time I didn’t feel bad about my body, I was 8 years old. And I turn 44 this year.
I want to point out that my mom is a wonderful mom, and she loves me, and she would never have allowed these things into my life had she known the amount of damage it would ultimately do. Ironically, it was probably so I could develop “good” eating habits and grow up thin, thereby escaping the looming fear of fat that had plagued her for her entire life. But that’s always easier to see in hindsight. And now that my generation — a generation raised by almond moms — has been entrusted with our own daughters to raise, are we making the same mistakes in a different area when it comes to “preventative” measures and how we talk about aging? We’re quick to blame social media for their obsession with skincare that’s not meant for their demographic — but we have to consider how much we’re helping it along.
If we feel bad about our aging faces, we might attempt to encourage our daughters to be proactive about managing their own physical aging process, heading it off at the pass before it happens, so they don’t have to feel the self-consciousness of “looking old.” We encourage them to embrace their bodies just the way they are, in a bid to spare them the body issues we’ve struggled with … but then we lean closer into the mirror with a disapproving frown and pull a sagging eyelid up with one finger, or closely inspect our crow’s feet with dismay.
“[C]onsidering the speed at which social media is pushing ever more unattainable beauty standards onto children, it’s time for us to consider our moral obligation to minimizing damage for the next generation,” writes Alexandra D’Amour for the New York Times.
Psychologist Dr. Kelsey Latimer, an eating disorder and body image specialist, tells SheKnows there’s one important thing to keep in mind — and to make very clear to our children.
“We need to remember that the dieting and beauty industries are extremely powerful and they make a lot of money on our perceptions that there is something wrong with us — and they have the solution!” she points out. “I think the ‘answer’ to what we do is similar to what we have done to slightly push the needle away from overly-thin bodies as the only accepted body type in this country. That didn’t happen accidentally; we as a culture made that happen by not expecting more and forcing the industry to provide inclusion.” The same has to happen with aging, she says. “We need to show as a culture that we want to appreciate our age and aging is not a scary thing. Until that happens, it will be very difficult to see change.” This means giving compliments for things other than external appearance, recognizing the beauty in aging, and talking honestly about how our culture is influencing us.
It’s hard enough to be a woman. Why is there always something to keep us from shining as brightly as we’re meant to? Why, when we make strides in one problem area, does another thing pop up to make us feel horrible about ourselves? Are “they” doing this to us — social media, the patriarchy, multi-billion-dollar industries — or, by perpetuating it, are we doing it to ourselves? And, by extension, condemning our daughters to a lifetime of thinking they’re not good enough because their bodies and faces do (gasp!) exactly what they’re biologically supposed to do as they age?
Please, moms … don’t let the beauty industry feed off our daughters’ self-hatred the way the diet industry has fed off of ours. We need to teach them that aging is a beautiful, natural privilege — but to do that, we have to start believing it ourselves.
Before you go, check out this list of women who Hollywood tried to tell us were “fat”.
