I'll Let My Young Daughter Wear Red Lipstick Before I Let Her Use Social Media

Fiorella Valdesolo
·9 min read

Photography by Ernesto Valdesolo; Courtesy of The Pike School (center)

From sea to shining sea, preteens are spending their birthday money on barrier-repair creams and collecting fragrances like Beanie Babies. Allure set out to find out when and how tweens became beauty experts—and over the course of six weeks shadowing seven of them, we got some compelling answers. Come get to know Generation Beauty.

When I was 13, I had a summer job at a pastry shop in Boston’s North End neighborhood; every week I was slipped an envelope of cash in exchange for squeezing ricotta into rows of cannoli shells and pulling espresso after espresso. The air was perpetually sticky from the lack of air conditioning and the haze of powdered sugar; I longed to be outside. But my focus on earning money was unwavering. Usually, my envelopes of cash were shuttled directly over to Newbury Comics where I would procure the latest CDs that I’d read about on the pages of Sassy or heard a track from on WAAF, the local alternative radio station. At 13 (my approximate age in the photos you see above), my money was almost exclusively earmarked for music (or perhaps a babydoll ringer tee from the Delia’s catalog); for my now 13-year-old niece, much of her babysitting earnings end up at Sephora on products like Glow Recipe Watermelon Glow Niacinamide Dew Drops, and Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb, and Supergoop Glow Screen, and Drunk Elephant Bouncy Brightfacial.

Tweens and teens engaging with beauty products is, of course, nothing new. I too had beauty items that I coveted in my junior high years—those fruity lip glow rollerballs, The Body Shop’s mango body butter, cK One, the circular Flicker razors. But the beauty rules of engagement have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Consider the difference in our points of discovery. I learned about Clairol Glints or Conair Hot Stix from the commercials during Beverly Hills 90210 or from the magazines that got shuttled around the cafeteria lunch table or from—the ultimate sage on matters of makeup (and making out)—a friend’s older sister. Now, that discovery happens on TikTok or YouTube—it’s constant and it’s at your fingertips. Gen X, of which I am a part, is uniquely positioned: we lived in both the before and after days of cell phones and digital hyper-connectedness. I remember doing homework on a typewriter, I can hum the sound of the AOL dial-up, and I spent my formative years talking to friends on a phone (a duck-shaped one) attached via a cord to my bedroom wall. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was in my 20s, a smartphone until I was 32; a big part of me wishes that could be the same for my six-year-old daughter.

Because our phones, and our perpetually online presence, are a big part of why fifth graders are buying $60 moisturizer. And, perhaps more depressingly, thinking they need it. Teen magazines in the ‘90s were, as anyone who had to suffer through articles about how to make him like you or how to fit into that dress, incredibly toxic. But I could turn a page on 7 Ways to Get His Attention, and it wouldn’t be served up before me a dozen more times before dinner that day. Nor would gushing video reviews of a new lip gloss that I’d never heard of but, wait, actually, it turns out (by video number five) I must have. Today it’s hard to discern what is really a necessity, or even just a really nice-to-have. And that’s the point: If we see something enough times as we’re scrolling, we can’t stop thinking about it. And we can so easily have it. Outfits, products, places, are all tagged, ready to continue the consumerist spin cycle. The algorithms are working. Beautifully. A scroll through Instagram often results in me putting something in an Amazon cart that would otherwise not have crossed my mind. (Yes, I recently acquired a weird heated neck massager that I have no room for.) For my niece, who wasn’t allowed to have a phone until she was 14 (and is still not allowed social media), ads for beauty products pop up as she scans sweatshirts in the sale section on Hollister or PacSun’s website. She recently asked me about Mario Badescu’s facial sprays, which we spotted while in line at Urban Outfitters.

One recent study found that teens are interrupted 237 times a day by their devices.

It’s not just the constant stream of products, though, it’s the constant stream of images, period. We are all looking at (and scrutinizing) ourselves more; phones are mirrors, and we are staring down the barrel of them. I long for a time when interacting online meant uploading 20 random, often blurry, photos of myself to Friendster and walking away. Now images and videos are so methodically filtered and edited that they’re inevitably contorting our beauty ideals. In the ‘90s, I compared myself to my IRL peers and a handful of celebrities. Adolescents today are faced with dozens, if not hundreds, of images each day of people they think perhaps they should measure up to. All our time spent online is simply changing our brains, and while adults, I can attest, feel the psychological impact of this nonstop digital chatter too, kids simply process it differently.

At a recent discussion about the impact of social media on children’s mental health, Julie Scelfo, a former New York Times reporter who has started a modern-day version of MADD, called MAMA (Mothers Against Media Addiction), spoke about how kids’ increasingly screen-facing existences are hijacking their neural pathways while their brains are still developing. One recent study found that teens are interrupted 237 times a day by their devices. Just this week, the surgeon general called on social media companies to add a tobacco-style warning to their products because of the mental health risk for adolescents. “There are so many screens everywhere our bodies and brains aren’t able to process the constant onslaught of media and information,” Scelfo said during her presentation. I nodded vigorously; the rows of parents in the auditorium around me all bobbed their heads in unison too.

In engaging with beauty, what tweens—and, frankly, adults too—often get mistakenly and maddeningly sold on is the notion that it’s “self-care.” And self-care is always good. Right? It’s an idea I’ve been guilty of perpetuating. The care your skin needs in product form is pretty simple, though: cleanser, moisturizer, and sunscreen (something I wish I had been an earlier adopter on). For adults, everything else is considered extra; for tweens and teens, everything else can, many dermatologists agree, do more harm than good. Nothing speaks to the pervasiveness of our ageist culture as powerfully as the fact that teens are thinking about aging skin at all. And yes, there are mood-boosting benefits to having a ritual, something you can rely on when the world feels particularly overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to cost anything. Or be about how you look. If what our children are sold as self-care is centered around their appearance, how do we teach them that their value isn’t attached to it?

What I loved about beauty as a teen is that it wasn’t serious; for me, it wasn’t about following makeup tutorials or multi-step routines, it was about having fun. I dyed my hair with powdered KoolAid or Manic Panic, I swiped on glittery eyeliner and vampy (but not the Chanel Vamp) lipstick, I slathered on drugstore face masks (specifically Queen Helene’s Mint Julep and that St. Ives gel one you peeled off your skin), and I dabbled heavily in face crystals. When my kindergarten-age daughter plays with my makeup now it’s just that, playing. Eyeshadow? She gleefully sweeps it above her brows. Red lipstick? Ideal for drawing warrior streaks on her cheeks. At six, she looks at makeup and sees a world of colorful possibilities, tools, much like in her craft cabinet, to express whatever offbeat creative vision is currently rattling around in her little brain. Beauty is still a nebulous concept, not something that’s been conditioned and outlined for her by an algorithm. I hope to keep it that way as long as I can. And, ergo, I hope to put off smartphones and social media from entering her world for as long as I can, ideally until she’s through middle school. It’s a decision that I’m certain, having many friends with older children, will be an uphill battle.

A recent Gallup poll found that just over half of US teenagers spent more than four hours a day on social media, with girls exceeding that overall average. The GRWM and beauty hauls and makeup and skin-care tutorials happen to be a giant time suck. And that’s time that I want back for my daughter. That’s time I can’t imagine not having had as a teenager. Those in-between hours when I wasn’t doing homework, or tied up with extracurriculars or family obligations were precious to me. That’s when I would go on destination-less bike rides or make very elaborate themed mixtapes or draw or read or listen to music while lying on my bed or, yes, play with nail polish or test some elaborate braiding technique. Now that we are constantly overstimulated to the point of our senses being dulled, that free, unencumbered time when you can let the mind wander feels like a lost art. Recently, my daughter asked me what daydreaming was. Dreaming at night, she understood: her eyes were closed, her brain and body were at rest, and poof, a whole different set of circuits alighted, and dreams arrived. Doing that during the day, now that was a new concept for her. My dream is that by stalling the digital connectivity in her life for as long as I possibly can, it’s one that she’ll become more familiar with.

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Originally Appeared on Allure