Why are our children obsessed with anti-aging treatments? Take a look in the mirror | Barbara Ellen
Has childhood canceled? Or renamed the first phase ‘old’; a last chance salon for preventive skin care? Inspired by social media, especially TikTok, it seems that children are adopting strict anti-aging skin care regimens. They’re mostly girls, and they’re all shockingly young. Generation Z, younger teens, pre-teens and children, sometimes as young as eightaccording to the British Association for Dermatologists.
The buzzword is “preventive,” like the young slap on moisturizers, peels and elixirs intended (and priced) for older people. They use the old favorite, bully power. Shocked mothers received Christmas wish lists advocating creams and serums from brands such as Drunk Elephant and others. Products sometimes cost more than €50 or €60. Some brands are so expensive that mothers would not buy them themselves.
It’s no surprise that social media (the great hypnotist of the masses) is heavily involved. Influencers are cited as the cause of this anti-aging obsession, and children’s consumer power is growing. When Piper Sandler, an investment bank, examined purchasing behavior of nearly 9,200 teens last fall, skin care spending was found to have increased 19%. Dermatologists report that young people are showing up with complex, inappropriate skincare routines, not to mention increased anxiety, with a dermatologist in London expressing concerns from teenagers about “Crow’s feet”.
It’s all a galaxy away from my own Generation Now skin care for young people sounds like something out of a futuristic Philip K Dick thriller. The fascination with Korean culture has resulted in searches for ‘K-Beauty’ and (imperfection-free) ‘glass skin’. Just read everything “10-step” programs (sheet masks, jade rollers) can age you 20 years. The young people watch Get Ready With Me (GRWM) TikTok videos and get up early to perform laborious rituals before school. In 2023, a teenager went viral with her strict regimen, which she started at the age of 12. In between all the usual drinks and exertions, she stuck paper on car windows to keep out the sun.
So the early 20-somethings are being pushed to get preventive Botox, now that the industry has come to the very end. terribly young. There’s even a range of Dior skincare products for babies. Unsurprisingly, the Kardashians are in the mix: Kim and Kourtney’s daughters (10-year-old North West and 11-year-old Penelope Scotland Disick) shared videos of their skincare routines. Other young people become “Sephora kids‘Because they hang around the beauty stores, asking for advice and abusing the testers, sometimes stalking adult customers, waiting for them to pop up like little boobies with glowing skin when they put down the products they want.
Dermatologists say that while some young people need supervised help (for example with acne), for most, sun protection, hygiene and, in the teenage years, light hydration are more than enough. Instead, the collagen-filled youngsters are using products from some brands (pumped with retinoids, AHAs, and BHAs) meant for wrinkles, fine lines, and hyperpigmentation. They can cause irritation, flaking, sun sensitivity and even long-term damage, especially if mixed incorrectly. Drunk Elephant has explained on Instagram that some of its products are not suitable for younger customers.
All of this seems to go beyond the standard youth trends and peer pressure, and into a disturbing new realm of perfectionism, poor self-image and obsession. Of course, anti-aging is a staple of the beauty industry (Vantage Market Research predicted a value of $106.6 billion for the global anti-aging market by 2030). But this is Generation Alpha, who were born or will be born between 2010 and 2025. They’re children. How come they are so joylessly fixated on forming a laugh line in twenty years?
Then there’s our own ethical fine print to consider. How have we managed to produce a generation that spends their precious youth in fear of aging?
This is where blaming the oxymoronic anti-aging quake on young people gets complicated. In the dock you have social media and the beauty industry. However, you also have a society full of people who are increasingly unable to see themselves unfiltered. An era of such unrealistic, impossible standards that people arrive at plastic surgeons not with photos of celebrities, but with their own filtered/face-tuned images of dewy skin.
All this leads to another sinister factor that can best be summed up by the phrase “monkey sees, monkey does.” As shocking as it seems that children are participating in the anti-aging mass hysteria, perhaps this is the inevitable endgame of our ageist culture. Where getting older (and looking at it) means you’re done. Where the elderly are stigmatized and youth is the only acceptable state. All things considered, how surprising is it that such distorted, corrosive values have become entrenched in vulnerable, malleable young brains?
What now? Do we just accept that some children don’t want to ‘do’ childhood anymore? They will simply enter a state of premature adulthood and do the most aging thing of all: worry about growing older. Or will responsible parents continue to do their best to save little paws from the acid peels and moisture blasts they absolutely don’t need? Of course it’s about social media, mainstream media and the beauty industry, but it doesn’t stop there. If nine-year-olds are afraid of growing older, that’s our fault too. This was their age of innocence, and we ruined it for them.