A beast in pink lipstick, the already massive beauty industry targets ever younger consumers. Is there any harm in that? By Angela Barnett.
In my twenties, I religiously put moisturising cream all over every inch of my body. My flatmates would get annoyed that I took so long in the bathroom, but I thought I had to do it. Then one day I stopped. Guess what happened to my skin? Nothing. Afterwards, I wondered who’d convinced me I needed it. Was it Jennifer Anniston extolling the virtues of that oatmeal-looking cream? Or those milky Nivea ads from my childhood?
In 2024 we might think we feel we’ve gained greater awareness of unrealistic beauty standards and an industry that preys on insecurity. But the statistics would have it otherwise. Globally we spent US$374.18 billion (NZ$632 billion) on beauty products in 2023, a number projected to swell by US$20b this year, and to more than double by 2032.
The beauty industry is an intoxicating beast in pink lipstick and its devotees are getting younger and younger. A recession might be snapping at our pedicured toes but a combination of variables has ensured that spending on female beautification is greater than ever, not least because it begins at a younger age. The Gen Z/Alpha obsession with skincare which is rife amongst tweens (and younger) is thought to be closely tied to influencers and advertising on social media. The trend is so notable that a leading chain of Swedish chemists has introduced age restrictions on the purchase of anti-ageing skincare.
Widening the gender equity gap
What would the women who fought 60 years ago to burn their pointy bras and leave their faces free of lipstick make of this? The hours tweens and teens (and children!) spend watching skin-care routines and make-up tutorials on YouTube. Or the informed online debate among the same group about niacinamide and retinol serums (which sounds like something for the eyeballs but don’t put it there). This isn’t just glittery nailpolish and acne cream, but high performance and often extremely expensive skincare produced by brands such as Drunk Elephant who cleverly straddle two worlds with their fun branding and decidedly adult prices, many of their brightly packaged little goodies cost upward of $100.
Is this the biggest con yet to hit young women and girls? Their skin won’t start aging for at least another ten to 25 years.
Outside our own bathrooms, the money spent on professional treatments appears to have rocketed too. In an article about how artificial beauty standards are creating a new form of class divide, Dazed UK found that women spent an average of £1000 (NZ$2095) per month on beauty treatments for nails, hair and skin including injectables such as Botox and filler. That’s money that’s not going towards education, investments, houses and retirement savings, let alone meaningful experiences like travel. And if we add the gender pay gap, it ensures women have more to pay for a lot more, with often quite substantially less.
With the pressure to for beautifying “self care” now starting younger (and arguably continuing later in life, too) the financial inequity between men and women gets wider and wider and wider.
The ‘Everything Shower’ trend
As people in countries around the world, including New Zealand, are urged to take shorter showers, a new trend has emerged among Gen Z: The Everything Shower. With over two million views on TikTok, The Everything Shower is similar to what we used to call The Going Out Shower, but it’s longer and involves more products. You can see the appeal: it’s a spa in your bathroom! What’s the harm? Women have been pampering their skin since Cleopatra lounged around in sour llama milk! Except one article I saw on the Everything Shower recommended the use of 14 products in a process said to take up to four hours.
Four hours! Is this pampering or just more unpaid work for women, starting in childhood?
If we were to add up the time spent on appearance over a lifetime: the hair styling, the leg shaving, the plucking, preening, contouring, shadowing, shining, and smoothing, young girls (and older girls) could have learned another language, developed an app, or had many extremely replenishing naps in that time. It’s easy to trivialise but it’s time we never get back.
Ironically, it’s been found that the more emphasis placed on a person’s appearance, the less effective their performance at a given task. This phenomenon was defined by Renee Engeln, US academic and author of Beauty Sick (the 21st Century equivalent of The Beauty Myth) who studied large groups of girls and found that a sense of being constantly under evaluation for their appearance affected them cognitively and physically – they could neither think or play sport as effectively as those who felt less scrutinised.
Can something so debilitating really be described as “self-care”?
The financial and psychological implications for young women spending even 30-60 minutes a day on a beauty regime are huge. (And let’s not forget the impact of this massive increase in consumption on our poor planet.)
How much can we blame social media?
Accusing TikTok is the fastest way to get an eye roll from teens – but social media (Instagram too) does appear to be overwhelmingly where the demand for beauty products with the younger generation is coming from. TikTok was described by eMarketer as “a democratiser of the influencer game because it creates peer-to-peer marketing”. When someone your age or from your online community recommends something, you’re more open to trying it.
But if the influence is passed between young women and girls, that’s surely not where it originates. The suggestion that a girl just has to get the $84 Brazilian Bum Bum Cream to tighten her flesh because everyone else has it, or the Vitamin E and hyaluronic acid which will supposedly protect her from aging – that message comes from older people, the marketers and makers of these products.
Plus, creating insecurities and then feeding off them in the name of glamour was hardly born with social media. As Naomi Wolf wrote in 1990, “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance.”
The beauty industry is as old as time – the first cosmetics are believed to have appeared in Egypt 5000 years ago – it’s just that now, with social media, the message can be spread faster and wider and deeper.
Don’t blame the kids
In early studies by Renee Engeln, at Northwestern University in the US, more than 70 percent of young women said they thought they would be treated better by others if they embodied their culture’s ideal of beauty.
But wasn’t some kind of misguided notion in the heads of naive children. With studies showing that pretty privilege in workplaces and the wider world is real, it seems only wise that young girls and women would strive to acquire it.
Why not use the beauty industry’s offerings to get a leg (or eyelash) up, or use potions and lotions to avoid looking older in an increasingly ageist society? Young girls are looking for survival methods in a beauty obsessed world. That’s clever.
But then they discover that there’s a stigma attached to these methods. The world wants them to rally against unrealistic beauty standards and “just be natural”.
The world shames girls and women for being sucked in by beauty routines, and for caring about appearance, while at the same time selling them ways to do it. Then extolling the virtues of those who do.
No one is immune. These days we stare at our mugs all the time on Snapchat, Zoom, Facetime and it’s hard not to be focused on appearance, for all genders, and ages. It’s also nearly impossible to be immune to the “fixing” messages. Recently I bought something called Vitamin E Hyaluronic acid because everyone told me a woman my age should be squeezing three drops on before bed. The acid comes from a rooster’s comb and I could feel guilty about the rooster, and the cost – I could have eaten four gourmet burgers with that money – but I’m too busy slathering on anti-wrinkle cream.
I’ve spent years informing teens about the beauty industry. I know all its tricks and I still get sucked in. What hope do we have of protecting young girls from the beast in pink lipstick?
There’s no getting kids off socials completely, it’s too late for that, but we can teach them how powerful and intoxicating the beauty industry is. There’s no guarantee they’ll listen, but some of what we say might sink in.
Tips for parents
– Let your children know you think they’re amazing as they are, with no money spent.
– Model the behaviour and attitude you want for them. Don’t constantly criticise the way you look in the mirror or in photos.
– Inform them that anti-aging products are a useless waste of time and money for teenagers/tweens.
– Do the maths with them and highlight some other fun things they might want to spend that $84 on (or save for) apart from lotion.
– Remind them that what’s on the inside shines more than any youth-activating serum. (They will mock this mercilessly but it’s still worth saying.)
– Make sure that children under 13 don’t have access to it (some households might set this age higher). That’s the age that’s required by Instagram and TikTok themselves.
And finally, if your young daughter has been pulled into a beauty regime, the most important thing is not to blame and shame. Because it’s not her fault. That goes for older girls and women too. And men. Actually all genders. Everybody.
Angela Barnett is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau and co-founder of Like Bodies Like Minds.
