Beauty on Blast: Skincare, Social Media, and Girls
How TikTok influences tweens to buy beauty products they don’t need
—By Katie Moore
This summer, I got what I’ve been working towards my entire college career: an internship in New York City. With plenty of time and little money, I often found myself in SoHo on the weekends, hunting for the best popup. On those hot, muggy summer days, I would wait patiently with dozens of other sweaty New York 20-somethings, eager to try a new sample or sweet treat a company was offering for free.
One day in July, I came across a skincare popup, but when I finally arrived, I stopped in my tracks. What surprised me wasn’t the long line, but who was in line: young girls, largely aged eight to twelve, waiting in line for hours, just for a sample of the latest retinol—an anti-aging product.
Over the past few years, tweens have become obsessed with skincare. Cleansers, peptides, ceramides—these are all now part of the vocabulary of many 10-year-olds. Having a favorite moisturizer has practically replaced one’s favorite Disney princess.
The question, of course, remains: why?
Skincare sensation: For better or worse?
Myra Davis (LSA ‘25) has worked at Ulta, a popular cosmetic store chain, as a beauty consultant since 2021. During her tenure there, she’s noticed that the number of young girls coming into their store has “drastically increased…. When I first started working there, they were mostly with their moms and following them around the store,” Davis said. “Now, they come in groups alone, and they’re coming into the prestige sections, which I’ve never seen before.”
These new groups aren’t coming in and buying just anything. Davis noted that they’re purchasing almost exclusively Drunk Elephant and Sol de Jainero, brands that are popular on TikTok. “They make a beeline for about three specific brands and only viral products,” she said. “They know what they’re looking for and they want what everyone else has.”
There’s a more sinister side to this new phenomenon, though. Drunk Elephant products are known for their press-down pumps for many of their moisturizers, meaning that when you use a tester in a store, it balloons right out of the bottle. “They press down on it over and over until it explodes, and they just play with the products,” said Davis. “It’s super irritating.”
Beyond mere damage to store testers, the items that these young girls are buying can be doing harm to them, too. An NIH-sponsored study found that phthalates included in many skincare products can disrupt the endocrine system of young children, damaging the body’s natural hormone levels. Moreover, dermatologists at UCLA have been noticing children coming in with dermatitis—a kind of red, scaly rash—that results from using products with ingredients meant for more mature skin, including retinol and peptides. Even at its best, these often-expensive products do nothing for young skin, thus wasting anywhere between $20 and $70 on a useless venture. Yet, young girls are flocking to this merchandise in droves.
Marketing mavens: the role of social media and influencers
The skincare craze culprit is clear: TikTok. The skincare industry is estimated to be worth $164 billion and has only been rapidly growing in the last decade. A simple search for the word “cleanser” or “acne” on the popular video app will pull up millions of videos, each with influencers staring into their camera, holding up the latest product that they promise will give you the perfect skin. Their comments are filled with young girls asking what their nighttime routine looks like or raving about their newest Sephora run.
“I’ve been working at a summer camp for about five years,” said Warren Bugala (LSA ‘25). “In the last two years or so, the kids have started getting really into skincare. Right before lights out, they all go to the kitchen and spend forty, fifty minutes on their skincare routine…. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“When you’re thinking about that stage developmentally, young folks are just as impressionable as they are influential,” said Margaret Owusu, a PhD student at the Marsal Family School of Education studying Black girls on social media and the creative potential they generate online. “With the idea of the algorithm, once you’ve looked at one beauty video then that’s all you’re seeing, so you get this warped perception of reality and what people look like every day…. That’s where you start to draw these narratives of comparison where you don’t look like that but you want to.”
Building such narratives can be incredibly lucrative for those on the other side of the screen. Influencers, even those with relatively meager followings, can get paid thousands of dollars for as little as a single TikTok video. “They [influencers] are certainly getting paid, and not disclosing a lot of the time,” added Davis. “If they have a longstanding deal [and] they don’t disclose it, [it’s] a crime [under FTC law].”
Brands, too, are making significant strides in social media marketing—a new study noted that in 2024, young people are spending 23% more on skincare and beauty than they were the previous year. “Teenagers have always played a role in shifting what mainstream culture looks like, and I find that adolescents and even folks in college are really shaping the trends on social media,” said Owusu. “I think that comes with some really great things and some downsides.”
Beauty standards, TikTok style
While young girls may be consuming unprecedented amounts of skincare content, they’re not always aware of what’s going on behind the scenes. “With TikTok, there’s a built-in filter, and everyone you see is filtered,” said Davis. “I see people who are clearly really young saying, ‘oh, give us your skincare routine.’ You know that’s not what their skin looks like, but they don’t.”
It’s not just TikTok changing the beauty standards, though. “Snapchat is a really popular app that kids use, and of course, it’s really focused on filters,” noted Bugala. “So they’re always using these filters and yeah, some of them are stupid, but some of them are suggesting how they can look better, even in minor ways. That’s what they’re thinking about, just a little bit, when they open up the app just to text friends.”
“We’re in a phase where the nighttime care routine is like ten, fifteen steps,” added Owusu. “[Young people] don’t realize that this content creator is being paid by this brand, and they’re not actually doing this every day…but what adolescents see is that end product.”
This constant barrage of photoshopped features and faked routines is taking its toll. A study published in the journal Body Image reports that hyper-realistic filters, hard to detect even with adult eyes, are making young women feel increasingly dissatisfied with their own appearance. Consuming such content leads to constant comparison, and with viewers perceiving their content to be less edited and enhanced than it actually is, the artificial has become natural—and the only way to get it is through buying the product on your phone.
“Kids and especially tweens have always had a growing dissatisfaction with their appearance as they get older,” said Bugala. “But I think the bar for ‘pretty’ is a lot higher these days…. Everything has to be natural. It’s not about covering up your pimples with makeup, it’s about having clear skin. Or it’s being skinny without having tried too hard. They want to seem nonchalant.”
This nonchalance has led young people to focus intensely on their most minor characteristics. “They [young girls] are thinking about things I never thought about at that age,” said Davis. “They’ll talk about their pores and size of their pores and hair care…. They want to bleach their hair, pluck their eyebrows, contour, all these treatments so you don’t age your face.… It’s very hard to watch because they clearly know a lot about skincare and makeup and they’re trying to make themselves older but they’re young so they’re also playing with the product, so it’s an unsettling dichotomy.”
Moving forward
With all this in mind, where do we go from here?
The most obvious and popular solution is to start conversations with tweens and teens about social media. Instagram and TikTok are essentially impossible to avoid, but experts say that speaking honestly about how social media can affect one’s mental health and self-perception is the first step to raising aware and healthy kids. Furthermore, there are countless apps and devices that can limit screen time for adults and children alike, keeping social media use—and their harmful effects—to a minimum. A movement for a smartphone-free childhood is growing globally, making it easier than ever to join a community dedicated to keeping children off of screens.
“I think that even with all of the bad stuff that smartphones bring, there are a lot of people out there who really care about their children’s wellbeing, and you can see that in all of these kid-friendly filters or accounts that are really growing” summarized Bugala. “We’re starting to be able to utilize the power of technology for education, but we’re slowly creating a world where kids can still be kids.”
Feature photo by Becky Fantham on Unsplash