Last year, women across social media rebranded their flight from adult sensibilities into a performance of girlhood that was so enthralling, critics called 2023 the “year of the girl.” We went on hot girl walks, we ate girl dinner, we did girl math — hell, we tied pink bows around pickles and called it “coquette.” But what about real-life, complex girls, not the trends we see on social media?
While I was clinging onto my adolescence, watching TikToks about calico critters who failed to beat teen pregnancy, I saw girls online half my age perfecting 10-step skincare routines — ones that, on a good day, were precisely nine steps longer than mine.
At the beginning of 2024, these so-called “Sephora kids” became the focus of TikTok’s “girl” discourse. Except this time, adult women didn’t identify with Sephora kids the same way they related to rat girls, lala girls, OKOKOK girls, clean girls, vanilla girls, tomato girls — trust me, I could go on. Instead, the nomenclature speaks for itself. Twenty-something women — the same ones who went feral over adult sippy cups — have assigned “girl” to every combination of chronically online word vomit they can think of. But when it comes to actual 10-year-olds, they hesitated, reluctant to acknowledge them as Sephora “girls” because they fail to espouse the kind of prepubescent girlhood adult women want to remember.
“I was begging to a 10-year-old,” one woman recounted about her run-in with a Sephora kid, who snatched the last bottle of Drunk Elephant bronzing drops off the shelf. “Give me your Gucci heart Ring, and I will,” the little girl offered. The woman didn’t accept. “This whole side of my face would just twitch,” an ex-Sephora employee recalled about her encounters with “these gremlin bitch-faced monsters.” Another Sephora employee weighed in, sharing a story about a mom who freaked out over the $900 worth of product her daughter rang up, while “the little girl (was) just looking at her like, yeah, bitch I’m gonna spend $900. Like, I don’t know what you’re looking at.”
“I (was) trying not to punch this 10-year-old girl,” another woman admitted after a Sephora kid hit her with a “big ass bag” while cutting her in line. “I tried to (say excuse me), but apparently, you’re deaf,” the little girl insisted when the woman looked back at her in horror.
In the wake of the Sephora kid “epidemic,” women have come face-to-face with what it actually means to be a girl in 2024, and it isn’t pretty. The apocalypse of girlhood is upon us, and yet, we’re vilifying little girls for participating in a culture we created. Many of the women who have recounted their experiences with Sephora kids have only done so while filming a headband-clad GRWM, promoting the same Drunk Elephant, Sol de Janeiro and Glow Recipe products these children are fiending for. Certainly, the irony isn’t lost on anyone.
But is this really our fault? Should we hold adults responsible for turning Sephora into a playground for modern girlhood? The only way I could answer this question was by measuring the Sephora girl against my own 10-year-old self. We were both children of the internet — how different could we be?
In the early 2010s, YouTube witnessed a renaissance of beauty media, spearheaded by young women like Michelle Phan, Bethany Mota (MacBarbie07), Jackie Aina, Zoe Sugg (Zoella), Lindy Tsang (Bubzbeauty), Rachel Levin (Rclbeauty101) and more. But don’t be mistaken — calling these women “influencers” would be equivalent to watching a Generation A kid mime a phone call with their palm instead of their fist.
YouTube’s OG “Beauty Gurus” built their platforms from the inside of their childhood homes, filming makeup tutorials on a MacBook they propped up on a stack of books. The focus of their content — “Natural Looking Makeup Tutorial,” “Easy School Hairstyles,” DIY — make your own concealer (easy!),” “Back to School: Locker & Organization Essentials,” “School Morning Routine” and “Drugstore School Makeup Tutorial: 6th 7th 8th Grade & High School” to name a few — reflected the DIY nature of their fame. Beauty gurus were, first and foremost, ordinary young women, producing videos for girls just like them: too young to afford beauty products sold outside of a drugstore, too grown-up to follow their moms’ rules about wearing makeup and dating boys.
Beauty gurus didn’t respond to this age-old, preteen conundrum by asking their parents to shell out $68 for Drunk Elephant Protini Polypeptide Cream. Instead, if they wanted a beauty product, they made it themselves. In 2011, an article from the Wall Street Journal reported on a growing population of price-conscious, independent 8-to 18-year-olds, creating their own makeup from “bedroom cosmetics labs stocked with household products like olive oil and petroleum jelly.” Then-14-year-old Cloe Feldman (CloeCouture) explained that her “do-it-yourself videos (were) aimed at viewers who can’t afford to buy make-up.” Levin, then 16, echoed a similar sentiment, substituting Urban Decay’s $19 eyeshadow primer for a mixture of concealer and body lotion. This DIY beauty culture became so pervasive in the early 2010s that 10-year-olds (myself included) mashed up avocados and bananas in a bowl and called it skincare. We made pore strips from egg whites and toilet paper, bronzer from cocoa powder and rubbing alcohol, nail polish from glue, lip plumper from cinnamon, hair rollers from tampons and lipstick from crayons. Nothing was off limits.
From promoting EOS lip balms, Essie nail polish and Maybelline baby lips to Lush bath bombs, Bath and Body Works and DIYs that would make Sephora girls gag, YouTubers of the early 2010s inaugurated the golden age of age-appropriate, preteen beauty. But if beauty gurus succeeded in creating brands centered around affordable and accessible beauty, what changed?
It all dates back to 2017, the year the beauty guru died and the influencer was born. Well, technically, the first-ever influencer didn’t hail from the age of Starbucks unicorn Frappuccinos, Salt Bae, Anastasia Dip Brow, poorly blended contour and “Despacito.” Instead, the title belongs to the gladiators plastered across Ancient Roman billboards. Still, in 2017, the term “influencer” broke into the mainstream when audiences witnessed a shift in the way content creators rebranded themselves in the wake of the “Adpocalypse” — the 18-month period when high-profile advertisers boycotted YouTube after it was discovered that the platform’s automatic algorithm ran ads on thousands of videos featuring violent extremism, hate speech and even terrorist propaganda. To win back advertisers, YouTube launched an aggressive campaign to demonetize videos that spotlighted a range of sensitive issues and inappropriate behaviors that were deemed “not advertiser-friendly.” In the face of YouTube’s automated demonetization — an imperfect system of quiet and at times arbitrary flagging — creators from news shows to family vlogging observed declines in revenue as high as 50%. Gone were the days when creators could earn a living on Google AdSense alone. Much like YouTube itself, creators would have to sell out to the companies promising them lucrative brand deals in exchange for excessive product promotion.
As YouTubers increasingly privileged the interests of brands over their audience, the creators who raised us — the ones that 70% of teenage subscribers related to, the ones we considered friends — weren’t just the directors, performers and editors of our favorite videos. They were now “influencers,” leveraging their social capital to market products they never used before to their armies of trusting followers. As more and more creators marketed themselves as influencers in the eyes of corporate executives, it should come as no surprise that news outlets like Forbes declared 2017 as “the year of the influencer.” Notably, 92% of brands adopted influencer marketing strategies in 2017 after increasing their budget by 48% at the start of the year, allocating anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 per program.
The meteoric rise of influencer marketing redefined the beauty industry as we knew it. As early as 2016, makeup brands like Tarte Cosmetics were pioneering the field when we witnessed beauty influencers ditch the comforts of their suburban homes for a lavish, all-expenses-paid vacation to Bora Bora. Netting $21.1 million of earned media value, the launch of the now infamous #TrippinWithTarte campaign created the prototype of influencer brand trips: turquoise water, private jets, six-figure villas, excessive product placement, predominantly white casts, racialized hierarchies and alienating displays of wealth. Evidently, influencer marketing transformed the brands of our favorite content creators by bankrolling a lifestyle audiences didn’t relate with but instead aspired to.
The origins of the gaudy brand trip coincided with another phenomenon emerging from the growth of influencer marketing. When I performed a search query of the words “PR Haul” on YouTube, limiting my results to the most viewed videos made before 2018, I observed an influx of 2017 influencers, devoting 15 to 30 minutes to videos of unboxing an obscene amount of free product they received from the biggest names in beauty. Influencer marketing had struck again, situating beauty influencers as figures that audiences quietly envied. In response to a PR haul by Laura Lee, the top comment read, “It blows my mind how much makeup these gurus get. Like in a couple of weeks you can get more than I’ve had in my entire life.” “I love watching makeup unboxings because it makes me realise (sic) how poor I am and that I can’t get any of it!” another commenter wrote.
While beauty influencers have accumulated mountains of free products, the DIY culture of the beauty community had died out. When I compared the results of a search query for the most viewed beauty DIYs before and after 2017, I discovered that the faces of our favorite beauty gurus had been supplanted by the likes of “5-Minute Crafts” and “Crafty Panda” posting the kind of DIY brain rot that plays alongside Subway Surfer Reddit stories. With suggestions like mixing up glue and food coloring to make transfer-proof lipstick, these “UNBELIEVABLE BEAUTY HACKS” are so impractical they make you wonder if this second-wave of DIY channels are repositories of legitimate beauty advice or fetish content farms.
Influencer marketing has become so ubiquitous in our daily content consumption that we overlook how it precipitated the obsolescence of age-appropriate, preteen beauty on YouTube. Young girls are no longer being raised by the relatable, frugal, DIY-crazed beauty gurus of the early 2010s. Instead, Gen A kids are looking up to beauty influencers whose brands now revolve around tone-deaf brand trips, unopened PR, Gucci logos, pore-erasing ring lights, eponymous makeup lines, Dramageddon, undisclosed brand deals and fake reviews.
Plenty of adult women on TikTok have tried to make sense of the Sephora kids phenomenon by pointing to the shortage of old-school tween stores like Delia’s, Limited Too or Claire’s. “Those were OURS,” a commenter claimed. “What do tweens have now (that) they can own?” In some respects, these women are right — preteen girls don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of walking around the mall, awkwardly holding Abercrombie bags with young, shirtless hunks plastered across the front. As fast fashion has displaced the popularity of specialized teen brands, age categories have coalesced into a kind of young, trendy aesthetic that has made it possible for women to buy the same pair of Fashion Nova cargo pants for themselves as their two-year-old child. But when you step outside of the mall, searching for the traces of a pronounced preteen culture, you’ll realize this problem is much bigger than those women originally thought.
The erasure of age-appropriate, preteen spaces isn’t merely physical. In 2013, Gen A constituted the 40% of kids who used iPads before they could speak. In 2017, they made up the 78% of children age 8 and under who had access to a tablet, racking up an average of two hours and 19 minutes of screen time a day. While I had to fight my three siblings for the white MacBook we split between us in 2008, 59% of children ages 5 to 8 had access to their own tablet in that same year. Seven years later, a report by Common Sense Media found that preteen girls ages 11 to 15 were spending anywhere from 90 to 163 minutes on several social media platforms a day.
To a generation of young women who have developed a codependent relationship with their devices, the preservation of preteen culture is just as crucial in digital spaces as it is in physical ones. And yet, YouTube channels that were tailored to audiences of young girls met the same fate as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Twenty-four-year-old women were no longer posting hauls of back-to-school supplies six years after they graduated from high school. Instead, the explosive popularity of TikTok shifted content creation in an entirely different direction. Creators don’t make content for a demographic; they make it for an algorithm — one that favors user interactions born from trending audios, outrage, excessive displays of wealth and objectified bodies.
On a user level, TikTok’s algorithm vies for your attention by predicting your interests, even before you’ve demonstrated them with the like button. By actively testing its own predictions, TikTok constantly pushes the boundaries of what it thinks you’ll like. For fans of Taylor Swift, this might mean Travis Kelce thirst traps. For people in relationships, this might mean videos of angry kittens that look like your partner. For young girls fantasizing about life beyond their childhood bedroom, this might mean videos of college-aged girls getting ready with drops of Glow Recipe Dew Drops dripping down their cheeks.
To the 73% of preteen girls who populate the app, spending an average of two hours and 39 minutes on it a day, TikTok has fundamentally changed the way young girls are consuming media. By incentivizing creators to make videos for an algorithm instead of an audience, TikTok has collapsed the separation between age-coded content. Young girls are blitzing past the awkward preteen phase so quickly they’re missing out on the only blissfully ignorant stage of life when you can go to bed without feeling guilty for “forgetting” to wash your face.
When you begin to see Sephora kids as little girls cosplaying adulthood, it becomes increasingly obvious that they aren’t just entitled brats. They’re the victims of the slime-to-skincare pipeline — the channel through which young girls disguise their impulse to play as “self-care,” conforming to a pressure to grow up faster than ever before, bypassing age-appropriate, preteen beauty to try and look like a 22-year-old influencer. But underneath it all — the Drunk Elephant, the Glow Recipe, the Rare Beauty — they’re just kids. By mixing up their products into so-called “smoothies,” Sephora girls engage with skincare in the same way they played with slime as kids: Both provide a type of sensory play that stimulates a child’s senses and creativity, encouraging them to focus on how it looks, feels, smells and, God forbid, tastes. In this way, the Sephora girls who have fallen to the slime-to-skincare pipeline represent a growing population of young girls who are clinging to the only form of play they have left in a world that denies preteens a space to exist and embrace a unique version of girlhood.
Daily Arts Writer Bela Kellogg can be reached at bkellogg@umich.edu.