Baby-Faced: The Rise of Children Using Anti-aging Products

Written by Jessica Sutherland, University of Warwick, and Heather Widdows, University of Warwick

Glass skin, cloud skin, dolphin skin, neuro glow: Skin trends are nothing new in our digital world. But one increasingly concerning trend is the fascination of younger people with anti-aging. Children as young as 10 are reportedly asking their parents for anti-aging products, and “nearly 1 in 2 young girls (10-17 years-old) are worrying more about their appearance as they age, due to increased exposure to adult skincare content.”^1,2

Since skincare products are typically aimed at adults, their ingredients (think retinol, vitamin C, AHAs, and BHAs) are often too harsh for children and teenagers to use. However, this has not stopped products from becoming popular with children and teenagers, especially those that have gone viral on social media. A particularly trendy brand, Drunk Elephant, has received backlash in relation to its popularity with young children with dermatologists issuing warnings about the skin problems these products can cause for children.³ In response to worries that their products are too harsh for the skin of children and teenagers, Drunk Elephant leaned into their newfound audience and released a list of products that are safe for children to use.⁴

Speaking to BBC Newsround, one young person said they “see these products on TikTok and want them because they look fun.”⁵ Dermatologist Dr. Brooke Jeffy echoed this, recently telling USA Today "they're on social media and exposed to really constant marketing […] Skincare and some of these brands, they've just become a status symbol."⁶ As we are writing this, there are more than 316,000 posts on TikTok tagged #retinol. Children are being influenced into coveting these products, and potentially do not understand why influencers may endorse certain products over others. In a study from Ofcom, whilst 77 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds were able to identify that an Instagram post “was a paid-for endorsement,” 27 percent believed the post had been shared “because she thought the product or brand was cool, or good to use,” and 24 percent “because she wanted to share this information with her followers.”

It is also often older influencers that are promoting these products. In a 2022 survey, Tribe Dynamics (an influencer marketing analytics company) found that 47 percent of creators they surveyed (n=236) were aged between 25 and 34 years.⁸ Whether knowingly or not, beauty content is being pushed toward children via (mostly) unregulated social media algorithms.

Some find this trend baffling, others complain and mock the so-called Sephora kids; children who are ruining beauty displays in stores and fighting over stock.⁹ Mockery and bafflement are not good enough responses. It is not surprising that children are feeling the pressure for perfect skin—perfect skin we tell them is what they need, just to be good enough, just to be normal. We have written previously about the beauty pressures children face, and the worries of wrinkled, saggy, or blemished skin are seemingly just one more concern to add to the list.

Social media might be stoking the fire, but it did not light the fire. We light the fire, as we gradually came to value beauty and appearance over other goods like health and education. If we give our children the message that what matters is how they look, rather than what they think or what they do, then we should not be surprised that what they want are products that will help them attain the global beauty ideal, of impossibly smooth, plastically perfect skin.¹⁰ They are becoming—as very many of us are—afraid of aging, afraid of living in our skin, seeking the immovable skin of the Instagram image, doctored, filtered, and curated. The social media trend of the young is not an aberration; it is part of the value framework we have adopted and are transmitting. Young people using anti-aging products holds a mirror to our collective social values. If we don’t want our young people chasing impossibly youthful skin as their number one ambition, perhaps it is us that needs to change?