kids in sephora, moral panics, and gender essentialism

So, I haven’t written a substack for a while. I was in too deep writing the current chapter of my PhD thesis before Christmas and everything else I tried to write came out overcomplicated and dry. The end is in sight for that chapter and my brain is now allowing me to work on different things.

I’ve been seeing so much discourse online about ten year olds in Sephora and generally kids being annoying in retail spaces, pissing off employees etc. Obviously, parents should parent and stop their kids doing that, so I’m not really interested in talking about that aspect of it all. But what I am interested in is the general moral panic people seem to be having about kids being interested in skincare and makeup.

I’m not sure I’ve seen anyone come out and say what is quite clearly going on here. These kids are playing pretend like kids have always done. Young girls (because it is more specifically girls in the case of The Sephora Children) mimic what they see the older girls do, how they act, dress, what they’re interested in. Kids used to mimic older girls mimicking celebrities, pretending to be in a girl band, putting on weird quasi-American accents, and calling each other bitch. Now they’re mimicking the older girls and women they see on TikTok and Youtube, doing their makeup and talking about skincare. Kids have always pushed back against designated ‘kid content’ whether on TV or now online. It feels cool to watch and do what the adults are doing. I used to beg my parents to let me watch CSI with them and I didn’t want to read ‘kids books’ after the age of around seven - I wanted to read teen fiction, and then when I was a teen I wanted to read adult fiction. It’s the same thing.

It also has to be said: a lot of people on TikTok talk like children’s TV presenters anyway. Is it any wonder kids end up watching your Charlotte Tilbury makeup haul when you are behaving like a caricature, shouting into the camera, with fast transitions and emojis popping out everywhere? Influencers and content creators should be more sheepish about criticising these children when they are literally a core audience of their content.

So it’s not reeeaaally that deep that kids want to use skincare. Obviously they shouldn’t use stuff that is actually damaging for their young skin but that’s up to their parents to be savvy and say no. And if their parents can afford to buy them the fancy brands they seem obsessed with then whatever, sure, I guess. Where it does begin to cross into questionable territory is when these children start repeating or thinking about things like wanting to target or prevent signs of aging. That is when people who make skincare or makeup content have to think about what they are saying and who their audience is. The kids are just playing and mimicking but it just so happens that part of what they are mimicking is the damaging rheotic about aging we see constantly online. Ten year olds shouldn’t worry about wrinkles.

This whole thing also got me thinking about the decrease in space for children to be children. There’s well documented erasure of the pre-teen and teen categories in TV, film, books (just link about the re-categorisation of ‘teen’ into ‘young adult’), and clothing shops. RIP Tammy Girl :’( . There’s even less space for children to meet, socialise and be entertained outside of the internet too. So many places now require money be spent in order to be there (which kids often don’t have) or are just openly hostile to kids, or both! Pre-teens and teens especially are demonised - yes perhaps for good reason sometimes, the titular kids in Sephora are ruining sales assistants’ lives - but they are also kids and are going to push boundaries and work out what is appropriate behaviour, don’t act like you didn’t do the same sort of things. They can’t hang out in parks or streets anymore or people will move them on, there are fewer and fewer youth spaces, clubs and activities cost money, of course they are just going to wander shopping centres and malls trying to find fun. My block of flats has a courtyard where kids who live regularly hang out and they have been shouted at, told to move, be quiet etc etc and they literally live in this building. Kids literally cannot exist anywhere without being perceived as an annoyance.

And don’t get me started on the people that are now filming kids at Sephora trying to get some kind of clout or viral clip because of all this drama. You look like an absolute freak.

Tangent, but this all reminds me of the panic around alcopops in the 90s and early 2000s. The fear that the brightly coloured and candy flavoured alcoholic drinks like VK or Smirnoff Ice would tempt children into drinking and we’d have to put up with drunk eight year olds picking fights at the swings. We all seemed to forget that children cannot buy alcohol, it would be a rare parent that would give a child alcohol, and in fact the constant talk and advertisement of these drinks through these scandalised stories only increases the likelihood that children will see and want them. And, once again, if children do want them it is likely because they are mimicking adults around them. I lost count of the amount of times I poured myself a Vimto into a wine glass and pretended to drink wine like my parents.

A big element of this as well is the quite extreme gender essentialism we see in spaces like TikTok. A few months ago people were speaking ad nauseum about the tiresome topics of ‘girl dinner’ and ‘girl math’ until I wanted to commit a girl homicide. But the final cherry on top was that viral TikTok post about ‘girl hobbies’ that went around last week where someone said girl hobbies are ‘doing our skincare’, ‘social media’ and ‘shopping’, literally returning to the early 2000s ‘women shop!’ stuff. Why are we perceving women’s hobbies as just consumption and preoccupation with our appearance, again? It still manages to impress me how fast internet feminism can go from a woman saying ‘hey I like to do this’ to ‘all women do this and should be allowed to do this without hearing any dissenting opinions or critical thoughts on the matter and if you do criticise this then you are tearing other women down’. Like the concept of ‘choice feminism’ never existed?

Is it any wonder that when these are some of the ‘hobbies’ that are being shown to children, especially young girls, that we get kids playing with skincare and adult makeup like its a toy?