To think pre-teen girls don't need expensive skincare - "Cosmeticorexia" BBC piece.

[Prombles]

I found this BBC article interesting and a bit concerning - it describes girls as young as 8 spending hundreds of pounds on skincare, including products with ingredients aimed at much older skin, such as retinol, which might damage young skin.

I'm not in touch at all with the world of teenagers and pre-teens. When I was that age (1980s) we would start buying bits of make-up probably about secondary school age, use the kind of acne-defeating products mentioned in the article, and maybe a basic moisturiser such as 'Simple' or 'Oil of Ulay' as it used to be called, but no one would think of buying anti-ageing products or having a multi-layered skincare regime costing £££.

Posters who have daughters in that age bracket - how common is this now? Would you discourage them from doing this?

The concern is not so much having a skincare routine per se - it does seem a shame for them to get locked into an expensive and time-consuming process before it's needed - but the use of retinol products that might actually be damaging their skin.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx212x41evwo

When my eldest was. 9 her skin changed a lot got greasy and she got lots of spots we started a simple face wash and moisturiser nip fab pre teen range because of the changes. she still does that now at 12 with added weekly mask to help spot flare ups she started her periods at 10 . She’s never been on social media platforms and we’ve only allowed products we have checked out, she’s checked ingredients etc she can tell me a lot now about things she should and shouldn’t use on her skin after doing her own research. My daughters school allows very subtle make up but she doesn’t use any and if on weekends she uses alittle she knows how to remove correctly before bed I’ve talked to her about the importance of looking after her skin I wish I had when younger.

People thinking this is just like the old days of them experimenting with make up for a disco or reading a magazine like J17 once a week are massively missing the point.
Social media is pushing this constantly 24/7 in kids faces and that’s setting up young girls for a lifetime of feeling their normal human face isn’t good enough, which is a terrible state of affairs. Boys are force fed with loads of SM shite about needing to have muscles and be millionaires and alphas so they don’t get away from this unscathed either. SM is like drinking or smoking. Not for kids.

Don't disagree with that- but again it's largely a systemic not individual parent issue. My kids get no SM but my goodness do I feel like King Canute holding back the tide on a daily basis. More accountability by cosmetics and SM companies needed.

Yes, even allowing for inflation I don't think girls used to spend anything like £100+ on 'skincare' in the pre-social media days. Products marketed at youth - Clearasil and so on - had price tags that were appropriate to pocket money and Saturday jobs. Even make up, teenagers tended to buy cheap brands such as Rimmel (which was relatively even cheaper in the 80s) Body Shop (again, used to be a lot cheaper than it is now) Constance Carroll etc. It wasn't till people had left education and started work that they 'graduated' to more expensive brands, if at all.

8-year-olds might have been allowed to try on their mum's lipstick but cosmetics weren't marketed in that direction at all. You could get things like a 'Sindy Styling Head' that had water-based play make-up that children could use on themselves as well but it was definitely in the realms of play and dressing up rather than something intended to become part of an everyday routine.

We don't need regulations, we need parents to parent. It is parents that allow their children to use SM.stop handing children phones and tablets and take responsibility for raising your children.

I take it you are a grown adult and not a child, after all we were talking about little children using skincare.

Yes there’s always room for improvement and we shouldn’t be complacent. However, SOME parents will ignore any rules and warnings . School mum made her kid(9) a TikTok account, used her own birthday and details to bypass the age rules. After a while they flagged the account as underage (or maybe someone reported it) , and once again she used her face and ID to prove it wasn’t . Then she moans that her daughter saw this and was exposed to that or some random messaged her, which of course, it’s TikTok’s fault.

I'm so glad a couple of people mentioned the fact that pores do not open or close. It's a myth that's been around for years and my mother still believes to the point of sulking when I disagree with her.

My daughter is 12 and she uses a moisturizer with SPF and then cleanses her face with a gentle facewash at night to remove the lashings of black eyeliner. She's very much into the 90s alternative/grunge look so that's all the make up/cosmetics she is interested in. She uses hydrocolloid patches for spots. She'd rather be playing her guitar or drawing or playing with our dog than just about everything else. She's not allowed tiktok although she does have an Instagram account which is just pics of the dog or her guitar or Stranger Things memes

The very depressing thing in the original article is that Ellie May who is the focus of the piece is the main income for her family at 13. And has been for a few years. No parent should be relying on their child to be the breadwinner. That is exploitation by her parents, as well as the brands who partner with her and they in turn exploit a new round of pre teen girls to buy more shit. Round and round it goes

Pre-teens don't need skincare full stop. They need to wash their faces and possibly use sunscreen if they are out and about in the sun a lot and when they are on holiday with family. Older girls may need something for acne (but I rarely see teens with acne these days so there are clearly effective treatments).

I actually remember going to a skincare party with my mum and getting some then fairly expensive products out of it, when I was about 14! This was 1989. So yes, we didn't have Sephora but there were still creams and potions around. It actually did help, more that it made me take a little more care of my skin I think than anything as it smelled so nice.

Hmm, partly it's because there are better skincare products around and they learned how to take care of their skin when spots arrived (usually at pre-teen age).

It is different, but we had our own influences and influencers before social media, selling things to children. It's also naïve to think this is all terribly new or that we need to have a massive moral panic about it. Also social media and the internet in itself has been around for 30 years. There definitely needed to be far more regulation and it was so slow coming, but this is happening now and most people aren't letting their kids have unfettered access to social media.

@DeftGoldHedgehog Leaving aside moral issues, is it not worrying that these children might be damaging their skin with retinol?

Of course, the manufacturers don't care - fifteen years down the line, they'll make a fortune flogging curatives to women who ruined their skin when they were eight!