OPINION | Child stars, Consumerism, and Cybersecurity: The World of Sephora 10-Year-Olds

Photo Credit: Tea/Dreamstime via Narcity

A new term to describe a type of personality phenomenon was recently coined in the last year: a Sephora 10-year-old. A vaguely self-explanatory name, it is generally used to refer to female kids in the 7 to 12 year-old age range, identified by a couple of key factors — namely, an infatuation with specific cosmetic brands found within the Sephora chain that are generally popularized by social media.

The concept of a child engaging with products that they observe their older family members and friends using is no groundbreaking discovery. Children’s makeup, dress shoes, and other “make-believe” items for kids have existed for as long as most of us can probably remember. So, what's the issue? Well, generally speaking, the concept of dress-up has always been entertained by a supervising adult. However, as the idea of Sephora 10-year-olds developed, the term became associated with unsupervised children shopping solely in larger beauty stores that tend to cater to an older audience and purchasing products that contain ingredients that are harmful to the undeveloped skin barriers of children.

Take retinol, for example. A source of vitamin A, retinol is a popular product in many different skin care creams and other treatments as an anti-aging remedy. While it is not inherently bad as a method of acne prevention, retinol as a cosmetic-use product is completely unnecessary for the tweens who have been so infatuated with using it. 

To add to the lack of benefits of kids purchasing adult products from bigger cosmetic stores, Sephora kids have been poorly received due to the way that they are treating in-store items. Reports of excessively damaged display cases of products that these kids consider trendy have increased exponentially over the past couple of months. It has left both the people working in these stores, as well as other shoppers, very upset, and has painted a negative picture of the kids who access these spaces.

But why is it that these unnecessary, harmful products that tweens are scouring for are labelled as desirable in the first place? Well, obviously, the world of social media has exploded in the past two decades, with access to any type of content made much more rapidly consumable and unchecked. As a result, there has been a significant rise in the popularity of “get ready with me” influencers, who generate content based on their everyday lives. A basic “get ready with me” video consists of short clips detailing the steps of an influencer’s morning routine, typically accompanied by the retelling of a personal story of theirs during the video. The success of these videos depends on a relatable sense of environment from the creator to the viewer paired with a fast-paced editing style that makes them easily digestible. 

As they often do, influencers and celebrities promote products in these videos. Whether intentional or not, certain products become associated with influencers as sole factors for their super great skin, beautiful hair, or perfectly done makeup, when in reality, the results of their beauty typically lie in filters, genetics, or other forms of editing. 

Technology has advanced much faster than the educational materials we use to teach kids about internet safety. It has led to a generation of kids who have been given the means to consume content online, but not the laws and regulations in place to truly keep them safe in a digital world. As children continue to adapt to newer forms of technology, their parents do not, which leads to kids who are not being kept safe by not only their parents or guardians but also the apps that they are consuming content from in the first place. 

Children are being influenced by the internet to consume products rapidly; they have this urge to buy items that their favourite influencers also have, purely because they want the same picture-perfect lifestyle depicted by online creators. That is not to say that children are the only ones falling victim to this capitalist mindset, but since they are not being properly supervised and have not yet developed in the way that an adult has, it is much more unfair to them to be exploited in this way. Children themselves have even turned to social media in an attempt to emulate this “get ready with me” influencer style.

One example of these child influencers is a young content creator who will be referred to in this article as “Rainbow” in hopes of maintaining her privacy. Rainbow is a girl whom I believe to be 11 or 12 years old and has been uploading content to the internet for the last two years. She used to have an account on the prolific platform TikTok, on which she would consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of views. Since then, her TikTok account has been taken down, and she has migrated to Instagram reels as her new main platform for content distribution. She originally exploded as a creator due to her “unhinged“ and “bratty“ persona, often talking about things or people she disliked while getting ready.

 The response to her account has not been positive, to say the least. Since her account gained traction around the time when Sephora 10-year-olds first began getting a bad rap, she was constantly bombarded with comments defaming her character or insulting her appearance, without any regard for the fact that these people were addressing a child. It even got to a point where adult creators were screen-recording her content to respond to, or simply poke fun at her personality. While these responses could be justified as coming from a point of humour, they have never sat right with me.  

However, I don’t blame Rainbow for continuing to post videos for a community so full of hate, because it appears that she genuinely enjoys the act of content creation. What I do find an issue with is the lack of responsibility from her guardians to properly address who her content reaches and how it is received. While Rainbow's Instagram biography claims it is a “parent-run account,” this label is just a useless mask that doesn’t even begin to protect her from how ruthless the Internet can be. 

Any reasonable adult who supervises their child's social media account would immediately recognize that this persona Rainbow has adopted, in which she acts extra pessimistic and gossipy — which are pretty normal traits for a preteen her age — is the reason why she is getting so much negative attention. Yet, rather than restricting comment access or beginning to cater her videos to an audience closer to her age, Rainbow’s content has continued to stay the same, despite the heat she is receiving from it.

What this means to me is that the parents supervising this account know perfectly well that their daughter is being harassed on social media, yet they continue to place more value on the PR packages and social media clout that their daughter is receiving rather than how her current unregulated social media presence might affect her psyche. While unsupervised children consuming unrestricted content is harmful on its own, it is baffling to me that a child like Rainbow is in a position in which her parents are actively encouraging the continued hate of her character online.

Another end result of the Sephora 10-year-old phenomenon is the generational war that has continued to develop as the year progresses. For the past few years, there has been this — for the most part — harmless battle between millennials and Gen Z based on the generational differences between the two. For example, Gen Z typically views millennials as “Disney-loving, cringe, coffee fanatics” while millennials view their younger counterparts as “immature, screen-addicted, disrespectful kids.” 

While that generational war has its own flaws, a lot of which are based on stereotypes, the Sephora 10-year-old phenomenon has inspired a new wave of hate towards the newest generation: Gen Alpha. Obviously, as these kids continue to act disrespectfully in public shopping spaces, a certain level of annoyance is justified. That being said, what is not justified is taking to social media and acting like these kids are the bane of all existence. Complaints about these kids, rather than the underlying conditions that influence them, move the conversation from how children are falling victim to overconsumption and vain ideas as a result of influencer culture, to “Bah Humbug, this 8-year-old ruined my life by taking up space in a public store.”

In conclusion, I really don’t care that 10-year-olds are in public stores buying products that they don’t need. What I do care about, though, is how the online content that they are consuming has twisted this narrative that they need to buy certain products to be involved in what the “teenage girl” experience is. This fear of missing out that has been presented to them — the seemingly unfillable void of want — only leads to a lifestyle that constantly feels unfulfilled. The adaptation and introduction of the internet to children to prevent the continuation of this cycle should be a priority for anyone who claims to hold value over the development of their kids.