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Okay, it is a phenomenon that's getting a lot of attention that started getting a lot of attention at the end of 2023 around holiday season when folks were noticing elementary aged girls going to Sephora, using up all the just trimies and those are the little tester products. And then kind of running free without their parents and having a lot of knowledge about the products in the stores.
So they knew the brand names, they knew the price points, they knew what was for what like there's certain brands that are very popular with tween girls like rare beauty, which is from Selena Gomez and drunk elephant, which isn't explicitly for kids, but a lot of kids are chasing after these products. And so this was something that kind of was born out of social media and mainstream media caught on and now call these elementary aged mostly girls Sephora teens or some of the most important things that are going to happen.
Sephora teens or Sephora tweens. This is the culturestudy podcast and I'm in Helen Peterson. And I'm Elise Hugh, journalist and podcaster. We got so many questions about this. I was kind of surprised. And I think it's because people simultaneously want to defend the right to be in these public spaces and be trying on makeup. And then also are alarmed. And the biggest thing and we're going to get to this. The biggest thing people are alarmed by is like where did tweens get this money.
And that's an interesting question, right. And again, we're going to get there. But I think first I'd love to ask you just like from your perspective, both doing the reporting that you've done on the beauty industry, the global beauty industry. And like how a lot of these phenomena have been taking place are like the interest like younger girls interest in skincare has been happening for a while now.
So what do you see like you used to live in Seoul now you live in LA like what do you see in terms of differences are there differences and your daughter's own experience between those two places.
Yeah, what I'm struck by is the sameness of the products that the kids want like and I remember interviewing some beauty industry founders to who have found this as well that when we growing up as millennials and going to the balls and being exposed to the media that we were which tended to be like 17 magazine and why I'm in Cosmo girl. The products that were advertised to us and that we were exposed to generally were the same as well, but they were specific to our age group.
Right. So the things that we were using tended to be kids stuff right we weren't trying to buy 78 dollar lineage or a more a Pacific products. We were going to bath and body works and getting sun right in raspberry or country apple body sprays and things so right there tended to be kind of like an age stratification that was still happening when we were kids that now those lines are all blurred there's no borders for that because of the algorithms and what they're feeding children and teens.
Also, there's a kind of a speed to the trend culture I think that you probably observe this as well like it took a while for us to kind of see what the cool girls were wearing or the cool girls were doing in other places and then that kind of trickle down but we are seeing like kind of the death of sub cultures I think that's been observed and there's kind of this mass sameness to what kids in New York and what kids in Austin and what kids in Omaha are all seeking out.
And it tends to be the same kinds of lip balm and the same kinds of cover up and highlighter and powders and things like that. I love that you just use the term cover up because it's something that we absolutely used to use when we were teens but now like the teens would never say cover up baby cream. Yeah, it's concealer. It's highlighter and it's BB cream. I'm sorry or like tinted sunscreen.
Tinted moisturizer. The point that you make about how there's not this differentiation is such a good one because even though I you know I was like buying oxy pads so bad for my particular skin or like the say knives apricot scrub that people I like so familiar to all of us and also really bad for skin for most people's skin.
There's like if I went to the mall there was still like clenique was somewhat accessible right and it was kind of marketed as like the cheaper maybe an entry point if you had some sort of means into more sophisticated makeup but like I don't know like Lori Al was like no that is for adults like that is Isabella Russell Lini's line for adults. And it was a very clear delineation that I think is absolutely been eliminated.
Yeah and and that trickle down characteristic has is just gone to right things going from major cities into smaller communities through extended relatives or your neighbor who you looked up to because she was cooler because she was in seventh grade and you were in fifth grade.
Yeah. Our influences used to be far more local and now our influences are all exactly the same and so for something that is accessible in a lot of different like urban areas certainly but also mid-sized cities like we have one in belling ham in the mall and if I were a teen in belling ham that is where I would go in the mall.
Like there was like you could go to target and you could go to Sephora so I think that that kind of explains you know and we'll get to this too that it's also a very in person experience to go to an actual Sephora. Absolutely. The just try me is are just so compelling. I know. I used to try all of the perfumes you know like at the department store this is far superior to coming home smelling like CK1.
So we're going to start with our questions the first one is about the origins and this one is from Amanda. When did skin care routines become the domain for pre tweens and why my nine year old goddaughter had a friendsly boover who brought more products with her than I use on my middle age skin including something called Brazilian bum bum cream.
I don't know your old already have the butt skin that we want is this the new diet culture and are these girls going to have wild hang ups about their skin as they grow up. Okay first I would just want to say that like I had so many hang ups about my skin crying up being concerned about your skin is not a new thing. I don't think it's a new thing.
I think they have the added burden of maybe worrying about wrinkles because they are learning about anti aging products and things earlier there there's the mainstreaming of Botox or the idea of preventive Botox now in your 20s.
So this is a trend that I saw in the reporting for my book flawless again and again which was that once there was a technological solution or some sort of innovation to correct a problem then the you had a solution chasing the problem right there wasn't there the solution came first and then you realize oh well maybe I should be doing something to prevent wrinkles in my 20s.
But for the Botox being available to you in your 20s and being so accessible and cheap you wouldn't have sought that out in the first place. Yeah I mean and that's a tale as old as time is like how do you create new engines of consumerism as you identify new problems and then create the products that you can buy. Exactly and that gets a little bit of a man whose question which is you know when did this all start happening I think that I I noticed it at the end of 2022.
We really saw the mainstreaming of it in 2023 with all the get ready with me videos that's when my own daughters who are in third and fifth grade were starting to do their own like pretend get ready with me videos at home I was like yeah what are you doing because they would pretend to be like don't forget to subscribe at the end of the video.
I'm not part of so bleak. It's happening and that's when I learned about this genre of videos you know and make up videos are always kind of alluring and fun to watch I think for adults it just it exploded among six to 12 year olds and now there's numbers now that we're in 2024 there's numbers to back it up.
Business of fashion found that American households with six to 12 year olds so that's first to fifth graders spent 27% more on skincare in 2023 versus a year earlier yeah and that's rather alarming that's a pretty significant jump.
It also comes so it's not just the internet it's also the brands capitalizing on the internet yeah so so you have brands that say like well be sure not to use certain products like retinols on your skin that they're not for young people but they've also made their packaging and they're marketing very alluring for young people for their other products.
That I see with brands like drunk elephant and glow recipe and those watermelon do drops the kinds of products that are kind of edible or fruity that you want to eat those tend to be very you know the butter's. Bumbum cream those are just huge you know those are cute names packaging and it's easy for those to go viral yeah and if people haven't seen drunk elephant packaging we can put some in the show notes like very much.
It's appealing to a certain like playful aesthetic yeah right it's like playing with different play does but it's stuff that you put on your face. So there is an element of play that's going on here that's not dissimilar from playing with makeup either but I think that it makes it not only is it more expensive but it also is creating these.
I don't know like neuroses almost about like I'm preparing myself to have wrinkle free skin and to me this also highlights just like how much beauty norms can change over the course of a generation or two like we were tanning that's we were. I still remember my little palm tree stickers that I would put on my hip just to prove that I got the playboy bunny that you put on your house so it's so messed up when you think about it.
Yeah so that was messed up and maybe this is a messed up in a different way sometimes they don't know how to talk about this without being alarmist because I want to both situated historically and say like this is something that we have been grappling with like these beauty ideals that are ever shifting and so elusive and impossible to obtain and thus fuel consumerism like I want to normalize it but also be alarmed about it does that make sense.
I think it's absolutely important to be talking about these things and to be talking about it with our kids because just and Virginia soul Smith talks about this really eloquently because she talks about how just as we know that white parents raise less racist kids when we talk to white kids about racism that parents of thin kids or conventionally cute kids need to also make sure that they understand they have a lot of kids.
They understand they have a kind of privilege in a lookest in a fat phobic society and that that we are part of kind of a larger constellation of culture where the trends or the ideal body that's acceptable changes over time sometimes it's tan sometimes it's pale you know and so reminding our kids and kind of getting curious with them I think is really important. Yeah that like the ideals are not fixed they are arbitrary we decide on them so how can we trouble those ideals as well right.
So our next question is this is also about where all this is coming from and this comes from Eliza how much of the youths at Sephora wave comes down to the fact that these kids have nowhere else to go to just be together classic teen hangouts the mall a diner etc are vanishing is there just no other space to host. This in person connection and indulge in the performance adulthood that feels crucial to their development. I think this is really this is there's something here right like there.
It is an incredibly fun space like think about the makeup artists were there in my experience at Sephora you have all different types of people. All different types of genders like who have great makeup and will help you with it like that's fun and there is so much more to play with than the traditional makeup counter at the fancy department store that we have when we're kids so what do you think of this theory.
I think this there is something to this to and it really overlaps this is where the Sephora tweens trend really overlaps with the debates about whether kids are getting outside. And often free the free range parenting conversations that are happening because our kids now are playing so much in front of snapchat and like putting on snapchat filters to dress up digitally or artificially.
And at Sephora at least you're getting to do things with your hands touch them and put them on your skin and have a tactile experience which especially for kids who are so in some cases have their lives so controlled and programmed and have parents hovering over them more than maybe we did when we were growing up.
That maybe this does represent a kind of freedom so I can see that also I remember interviewing a South Korean researcher who specializes in kids using makeup because what they're observing in South Korea was exactly the same as what we're seeing in the United States but just a few years ahead which was younger and younger ages starting to wear makeup to school.
You know it was getting more and more normal for second graders to all wear bright lips to school and this was what four or five years ago when I was conducting interviews for my book and I remember the South Korean researcher saying that kids even as young as kindergarten in first grade are beginning to go to cram schools just after the school day so you can substitute cram schools for like extra curricular activities for our kids in the US.
And so and the hours that you had programmed would extend late into the night or at least a bedtime right and so playtime just old fashioned playing with friends writing bikes playing soccer on supervised that's really dwindled in some cities some communities.
And so a lot of kids in Korea were ending up playing on devices where you can dress up and you can change your face and you can experiment and decorate your image role play put on stickers whatever become animated and so what that researcher found was exactly the premise of this question that youth were using makeup in this case it was digital makeup as a form of play.
And you know obviously it subsequently benefits the beauty industry because it does then embed and normalize grooming and then you go into the store and actually get the products. But this is exactly where we have to ask kind of what the end point is and I asked the kid makeup researcher is there an endpoint where is it at what age do you think that you know kids are going to not want to experiment in this way anymore and he was like yeah well you would have to abolish the internet.
If they're for them to not want to not want to be trying out filters and things like that but whether it translates to the actual store I think is kind of an open question right now and whether we should stop it is another open question and I think the whole focus of this podcast episode right because it is developmentally appropriate to be experimenting and trying things.
I just seem so insidious if we're spending so much money to try and experiment and there seems to be only a narrow way or narrow way that kids want to look a narrow set of features or narrow set of products to achieve a certain prescribed look.
Yes, this is such a good point because I think in my like ideal empathetic mind I'm like look at these kids trying on identities it's amazing when in practice there is a pretty limited array of looks that are acceptable or desirable and I also think that probably there is some policing about like like if you were a straight boy right and you wanted to play around with this like is so for you.
So for a space where you can do that that's a good question yeah I hope so because most of the conversation around this right now is about performing traditional femininity right and then you get into gender performance as well and the way that we police gender. You know I think that some of the reason we got so many questions is because people as I alluded to earlier don't know how to feel about it and these next two questions we're going to play back to back because they're pretty meta.
Oh, okay. They're about like they're like why are we talking about this which I think you know this is part of the reason that we're doing this podcast let's go ahead and hear them now. The first one is from Hannah and Melody is going to read it. I remember so clearly going to Sephora as a middle schooler like when I was age 11 to 13 and experiencing it as an Emporium where there was just so much fun to be had.
I want to be sure to have grace for others experiencing that are the Sephora tweens these days different why are the reactions so strong right now. And then the second one is from Shivan why do Sephora teens particularly peeve me and my fellow elder millennials I see so many comments on reels and tiktoks begging the Sephora teens to take care of their skin barrier and I will say I have always loved skincare and face products growing up I use the cleaning clear face wash I used their stringent.
I used to use the St. Ives peach scrub I used basically every nutrient gene of product I used to shop the aisles of CVS with very little restraint and those products especially that scrub wasn't doing my skin barrier any favors so why does it bother us so much now are we subconsciously annoyed that they have way more options and choices than we did. I love that last point that's like maybe we're mad because they're not just because we missed it. Oxy oxy 10 on their faces and in flaming.
Yeah like burning off our nose yeah nose barriers nose skin. Yeah maybe they're learning the gospel of moisturizing way before I did I'm sunscreen to dry your skin off as much as I'm. Moisturizing their learning about sunscreen like I never have to remind my girlier daughters to put on sunscreen really yeah because it's part of their skin care.
Wow just like well you should know that you know I was in the tanning tube I was the pneumatic tube but you had you had a little bunny on your on your to prove I had achieved something. She's spending $13 to get me to get a mole removed.
Same I've had so many mold removed okay but also I remember growing up my mom saying oh you guys are so much better now you seen that going to the tanning booth but also using sunscreen when I was growing up we put baby oil on ourselves and like laid on tin foil so yeah we should be happy about progress right we should be like oh things are changing we are taking better care of our skin or skin barrier.
And then but then how do we hold that and the grace for people playing which we've talked about alongside this understanding that like to be a person in the world is to be constantly understanding all parts of your body right yeah we have to remember and emphasize again and again with all the children in our lives in order to be good ancestors that all bodies are valuable bodies all bodies are worthy
bodies and I think that can get lost when they're learning like they often learn from society that it's you know that fat or ugly is somehow unacceptable and that's exactly where we have to ask like why are you scared of that why why why is that something that you don't want to be or that that's you that believes use you know terms that
you know what these use and how incredibly marginalizing that is I try to emphasize with my kids your body is an instrument not an ornament this is something that I learned from an interview I gathered from an interview with a couple of sisters who are really activists in this space
because I think it's a lot of people how important it is to focus on what bodies are capable of doing and feeling and we can do all of that but I do think it's a little bit tricky and misguided to expect that a nine year old is going to change their behavior in the face of like more knowledge of cultural and social forces I think it's right more useful for all of us who are grown up and thinking about it and talking about it to imagine the kind of world that we want our kids to grow up in and I assume that we are in the world
we want our kids to grow up in. And I assume that we are in all an agreement that we want kids to grow up in a world in which their bodies are safe and worthy and have dignity. And if we want that for our own kids, whether they are thin or fat or have smooth skin or unsmove skin, then we should want that for everybody and what it would take and what kind of conversations that we need to have in our own families and with one another in order to get to that place.
And so I do not put the burden on my third grader to be like, maybe I should divest from beauty culture. But I do put it on me, you know? That's the thing is I think we can plant the seeds. Like I was watching Smurfs with my friends kids the other day and they're two boys and I was like, Leo, why do you think there's only one female Smurfs? You know? And this is the sort of thing that my mom was slipped to me and I'd be like, shut up mom, whatever. But like you have to sometimes have that.
Just get curious. Yeah, yeah. And then, and you know, and like I think that teens today are really having pretty profound conversations that we certainly did not have about beauty norms, right? About gender norms, but all these things. And sometimes maybe those conversations aren't happening when they're in third grade, but maybe they will start to happen when they're in seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade. Yeah, yeah, you are just planting seeds and you're creating kind of a framework.
And in my family, inclusivity is one of our values. And so there's a way that it aligns with our values to ask these questions. Like, wait, why do you consider it bad to be fat? And then what is that inclusive? You know, how does that align with our values? But okay, so the question, there was a question I think about whether today's tweens, sorry, every time we start talking about our tanning pneumatic tubes, we digress. I know, from our today's tweens, these days different.
They have a lot more options. Yeah. They are spending markedly more. I had that stat that I pulled out for you all earlier. They're also being directly marketed to as their own unique demographic, which is new. Because before it was like kids, like the lips mackers or just women, you know, and adults. Right. And there's kind of a carve out specifically for tweens. Yeah, because if I think about the commercial, the only commercials that we got served as teens were for Oxytend and ClearCell.
And Oxytend had Rebecca Gayhard to remember her. It was like on the back of a motorcycle. I mean, so aspirational in so many ways. But she was a teen. She was not a tween, right? Like this was marketing to teens. And I think that you're right that like this idea that skincare starts for third graders is like completely new. Yes. And that's despite the price tags of $78 for the whipped lala retro cream. Yes. Okay. This is the great segue. So we are going to segue now into our bonus section.
The triple A is called Ask and Anything segment. Where we're going to talk about the money. Can you stick around to talk about that? I will be here. Awesome. Okay. The part of the show is just for paid subscribers. So if you want to hear our discussion on giving teenagers allowance, reminiscing on how we spend our allowance as teens and offering up a basic skincare routine for someone who's starting at zero, head to culturestudypod.substac.com and sign up.
Elise, thank you so much for being here. This is like an immaculate episode. Where can people find you if they want to hear more from you? Thank you for having me. I've had so much fun. If you want to hear about a lot of the trends we talked about, I wrote about them in my book called Flallis. And you can find me and how to reach me all at Elise Hugh, ELISEHU.com. Amazing. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the Culture Study podcast. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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