Sephora Kids: The Tutorial Gets Younger

By the spring of 2024 the beauty business had a new customer, and a name for her. Tweens buying creams, gels, face masks and peels had become, in CNN’s words, “Sephora Kids”, and scores of TikTok and Instagram videos documented what adults online called a tween invasion of Sephora and Ulta stores.^[1]

The products were mostly skincare. The way they were sold was the decade’s own: a short video, watched on a phone.

The habit took hold in lockdown. With salons shut in 2020, people turned to YouTube makeup tutorials and home remedies, and TikTok became “a popular destination for trending beauty products, parodies, tutorials and hacks”; it gave that year #Soapbrows, brows shaped with a spoolie and an ordinary bar of soap.^[2]

By 2023 the platform was moving goods. The Associated Press described #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, in which users showed off what they had bought after seeing it there, and cited NPD Group data showing that TikTok had influenced purchases of skincare and fragrance more in 2022 than in 2021. Compared with Instagram and YouTube, the AP noted, TikTok was “fairly new to driving consumer behavior”.^[3]

The format bred its own scepticism. Early in 2023 “de-influencing” videos, telling viewers which blushes, mascaras and skincare were not worth the money, drew more than 150 million views in a few months. Around the same time a makeup artist with 14.4 million TikTok followers was accused of wearing false eyelashes while promoting a L’Oréal mascara in a sponsored video.^[4]

A marketing lecturer who had studied how Gen Z deals with creators told the AP that influencers’ “source credibility” was “slowly getting eroded”. The de-influencers were not always what they seemed either: some of the alternatives they recommended were listed on their own Amazon storefronts, where influencers earn commission.^[4]

What reached the youngest viewers was mostly skincare. A Sephora employee in New York told CNN that tweens came in without asking staff for advice and made “a beeline” for trendy, expensive brands hyped by influencers, Drunk Elephant, Glow Recipe and Laneige among them. Drunk Elephant’s online FAQ said that not every product in its line should be used by fans of 12 and under.^[5]

The money was real. The market researcher Circana found that over the holiday season spending on higher-priced beauty, skincare included, grew 16 per cent among higher-income households with children under 18, against 6 per cent among households without children.^[5] PBS NewsHour reported that households with tweens aged six to twelve had spent almost $2.5 billion on facial skincare the previous year, an increase of 27 per cent.^[6]

Dermatologists described the cost. One in New York told CNN of patients aged ten to twelve arriving with “redness, burning, itching, scaling and rashes”, and of worsening acne from too many products; a colleague in Missouri said tweens had no need of retinol, sold as an anti-ageing ingredient.^[8] A dermatologist in Manhattan told PBS NewsHour of children bringing in a shopping bag holding a twelve-step morning routine and a ten-step evening one, and agreed when the correspondent called their adviser “Dr. TikTok instead of Dr. Google”.^[9]

None of them argued against skincare as such. What they recommended for young skin was short: a gentle cleanser, a moisturiser and sunscreen.^[8][9]

California tried to legislate. Assembly Bill 2491, introduced by the Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee, would have barred children under 13 from buying over-the-counter anti-ageing products containing vitamin A or its derivatives, such as retinol, or alpha hydroxy acids; sellers would have had to take reasonable steps such as posting notices, checking ages at the till and refusing prepaid cards online.^[10] The Personal Care Products Council, the industry’s trade association, called it a “hastily drafted attempt to use legislative force to stop a social media trend”.^[10]

The bill passed the Assembly’s Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Committee in April 2024 and failed to advance in May, after it came before the Appropriations Committee. Lee said he remained “committed to protecting children from the unnecessary harms of anti-aging products”.^[10]

How much of the buying was makeup is not known. The reporting used here describes mostly skincare, though NBC News noted children sharing videos of their makeup routines as well as their skincare.^[11] The market figures come from firms whose methods the reports do not set out, and PBS did not name the source of its own.^[12]

Nor is it known what the trend did to the children in it beyond the cases dermatologists described. This account names none of them, and the sources record no measure of harm across the age group as a whole.