In Defense of Sephora Girls
On yet another mindless moral panic
“Can I tell you something?” my 12-year-old daughter asked me the other day.
I answered the way I always do now—with a question. “Is it about skin care?”
She allowed that half-guilty mischievous slip of a smile. “Yes.”
As usual, I sighed, but allowed her to delve into the price of Drunk Elephant hyaluronic acid at Wal-Mart versus Ulta, and strategize about how much of her allowance to allocate to this particular product.
Many a media outlet has informed me that I should be upset about the tween skin care obsession, that it’s damaging to girls in all kinds of ways: to their self-esteem, their bank accounts, their epidermis if they use the wrong products. They are forgoing their adolescence to assume the role of mini-adults, nixing their chance at a real childhood—one blissfully absent of mirrors and self-consciousness—because they have become “Sephora girls.”
My daughter is one of these girls, who spends (wastes?) a disproportionate amount of time talking and thinking about skin care. She watches influencers—skinfluencers?—reads product reviews, and compares notes and prices with her friends. Sometimes they travel in a pack to the beauty store, to buy—or fantasize about buying—exotic-sounding products like Glow Recipe Blueberry Bounce Cleanser or Brazilian Bum Bum cream.
Though I don’t often buy her these products, she’s found a workaround. For birthdays, each friend gets the other a Sephora gift card, paid for by the parents. I sort of admire the sneakiness of the strategy.
What I don’t admire is the moral panic of adults, denouncing this trend as if it’s comparably dangerous to other socially-mitigated contagions manifesting among teenage girls, like anorexia, tics, gender dysphoria, or dissociative identity disorders.