Panicking about the girlies

And other links for your Sunday

Over the holidays there was no shortage of news stories about young girls shopping at Sephora. Or, depending on your perspective “invading” Sephora. As if young girls don’t have a right to exist in the public.

The collective panic over the behavior of young women is more telling about our own moral biases and misogyny than it is about the behavior of young girls.

Each story I’ve read seeks to blame tween-heard behavior on social media. As in, if those girls would just log off TikTok they’d stop being so frivolous and obsessed with retinols. But explain to me why, in a culture that fetishizes youth and values women based on looks, girls shouldn’t get into skin care?

We try to have it both ways — telling girls to be strong, and powerful, and to love themselves, all the while we are dieting, “cleansing”, weight-lifting, and pinching our belly fat in the mirror. And every woman knows all too well the reality that if she experiences hardship, heartbreak, a health crisis or god forbid the passage of time, someone will inevitably say she’s “let herself go” or “stopped caring about herself.” Of course, you can’t try too hard to look good. Studies show that women who exert “high effort” beauty work are seen as “less moral.” It’s an impossible place of dissonance. One where you are supposed to try, but not try too hard.

Perhaps the reason adults are chiding these buying habits is because they reflect adult culture back in an uncomfortable way.

But I wanted to bring it up because in every story that I’ve read about tweens and teens buying beauty products, not one has addressed the fact that these are children who came of age during the 2020 shutdown and that teen girls are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis.

My daughter turns 13 in March and she too is a skincare girl. She loves her lotions and face masks. The desk in her room is piled with an assortment of body potions and soaps. Recently, we took a trip to Chicago to see my sister and my daughter packed a mini suitcase inside her suitcase with an array of self-care items.

It reminded me how in the summer of 2020, I started buying her lotions and bath bombs as a way of giving her something to do in our isolation. Something that felt like kindness and care. As puberty hit hard, I’ve talked to her about skincare — pimple patches, lotions, creams, oils, and hydration. Each time we have these talks I remember my own puberty journey when I had nothing but Clerasil, rubbing alcohol and a rising sense of panic over my hormonal face.

My daughter, like me, is also a highly motivated, very anxious person. And when she was five we worked with a therapist to come up with techniques for her to learn to calm the worries and fears that crowded her mind. One of those techniques was showering. As the years have gone by, “taking a shower to calm the nerves” has turned into a nightly routine involving scented candles, lotions, and shampoo.

It’s never occurred to me to worry about this habit. Putting on lotions while the horrors persist has always seemed like a neutral act — a positive thing a girl can do in a world hell-bent on her destruction.