In September, I had a meltdown in Mecca, the cosmetics store. I was looking at a slim tube of Summer Fridays lip butter for $40. Outwardly, I showed no signs of my inner turmoil, which felt like the beginnings of a panic attack. I was suddenly overwhelmed: the warm lights, the sweet smells, the promises everywhere of flawless skin and glowy lips. The saleswoman, herself flawless and glowy, asked if I needed help. No, I said, returning to the product in question.

My 10-year-old daughter, standing expectantly next to me, was carrying a blue wallet in which she’d squirrelled a surprisingly large wad of cash: a few $50 notes from grandparents for Christmas and birthdays, money for chores. I’d told her she could spend it on whatever she wanted. This, I reasoned, would give her some independence and if she wasted it, that in itself would be a valuable lesson. This was a mistake, I now realised. At $40, this 15 millilitres of lip balm she coveted was a bridge too far.

I was flooded with thoughts. When I was 10, I would never have spent $40 on a lip balm, even if I’d had the money. I thought, too, about the profit ­margins on beauty products, something I’d recently researched (in the first half of this year, for example, 75 per cent of L’Oreal’s $36 billion global sales was gross profit). Also: how does my daughter even know about this lip balm? She’s not on social media. And were the boys in her class spending obscene amounts on their lips and worrying about glowy skin? Hell no! (A little later, my daughter explained her need for a particular moisturiser. “It will make my skin as smooth as a baby’s bum bum,” she said. “Your skin is as smooth as a baby’s bum bum,” I replied.)

Parenting in 2024 has meant wrestling with a skincare craze that is quite mind-boggling.

And then, bloody ethicist Peter Singer popped into my brain, as he often does since reading his book The Life You Can Save ($40 would protect three children from malaria during a high-risk ­season, he seemed to be whispering in my ear). Peter Singer is a real downer of a brainworm, let me tell you. And what about the kids in Gaza? This all seemed too ­indulgent, too consumerist, altogether too much with the state of the world as it is. I literally ran out of Mecca with a confused 10-year-old hot on my heels.

As anyone with a tween daughter knows, ­parenting in 2024 has meant wrestling with a skincare craze that is quite mind-boggling. It’s tricky to quantify the size of this global phenomenon, which, just to clarify, is not about make-up, it’s about ways to care for your skin: cleansers, moisturisers, balms, creams. In the United States, households with six- to 12-year-olds spent 27 per cent more on skincare in 2023 than the year before, according to data from NielsenIQ. In Australia, tweens are flocking to Mecca and its rival cosmetics store Sephora to buy their ­favourite brands like Sol de Janeiro, Summer Fridays, Drunk Elephant and Bubble Skincare. Often packaged in bright candy hues – catnip for tweens – these brands are spruiked by TikTok and YouTube influencers, ­particularly via Get Ready With Me (#grwm) videos. Consequently, there’s a rash, if you’ll forgive the pun, of tweens who’ve turned red and splotchy after using potent serums, retinol and acid solutions that can damage the skin’s top layer and are designed for ­ageing complexions (dermatologists and the brands have directed tweens away from these, yet most of the packaging still carries no warnings).

Each morning, my 10-year-old leaves for school in an aromatic cloud of body mist, hair oil (actually mine), moisturiser, lip balm and cleanser that sometimes makes me sneeze. Her products, displayed in a shrine-like arrangement in her bedroom, empty boxes lined up just so, include a Sol de Janeiro body cream that boasts of being “retinol-mimicking” and a “bright cream” with “smoothing fruit AHAs” (alpha hydroxy acids, which can have an exfoliation ­effect unsuitable for young skin). There’s also a small bottle of salicylic acid solution that was part of a pack from The Ordinary. I’ve suggested she donate this to my ageing skin, but she intends to swap it with school friends.

At Priceline recently, my daughter was up and down the aisles like a lawnmower, searching for her latest fixation: Bubble products. The saleswoman explained it was all out back; only empty boxes were on display. “For safety,” she said. “These are very popular.” What did she mean by “safety”? Perhaps thieves? Or maybe the store has been hit by the “Sephora kid” phenomenon? (This is when marauding tweens descend on Sephora, try all the products and leave behind a gooey mess.) My daughter ­believes being a Sephora kid is the lowest. These, she says, are younger kids who misuse the products like ­serums. Sometimes she accuses her seven-year-old sister of being – horror! – a Sephora kid. So we’re stuck in this weird hierarchy where I’m watching that my eldest doesn’t become a Mecca tween, while she’s watching whether my youngest becomes a Sephora kid, while I’m hoping this all doesn’t turn me into a Dan Murphy’s mother.

In her 2011 book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, ­journalist Peggy Orenstein talks about the work of American historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, who compared the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the 19th century with those made 100 years later. Your typical girl from the distant past had
lofty goals: ­self-restraint, helping others, becoming better-read. The contemporary girl aimed for self-improvement, too, but that meant resolutions such as losing weight, wearing good make-up, new clothes. “I wonder why we adult women, with all our economic, political and personal freedoms, have let this happen to our daughters?” Orenstein asked.

I understand what she’s saying, but I’ve come to realise there are much bigger forces at play. I remember fighting against the princess phen­omenon, which puts these ridiculously passive creatures – princesses – on a cultural pedestal. It was like I was sandbagging the house, but the pink tulle kept flooding in, under the door and down the hallway, through movies, advertising and the endless plastic crap that gathers around little girls like their own personal flotsam and jetsam.

‘I’m just looking after my skin, Mummy.’ It’s a killer line and the beauty industry knows it.

It’s the same with this skincare craze. I’ve been ­trying to inoculate them against unattainable ­beauty ideals for years. I never mention how I look in front of them. I try to put my insecurities aside and be ­body-proud. And yet, I have a daughter who is totally in the grip of the beauty industry – at the tender age of 10. Capitalism, it seems to me, is a force multiplier: it feeds off patriarchal norms around female beauty and is then amplified by social media. Basically, it’s a shitshow.

I know there are upsides. I understand that collecting skincare gives her a sense of belonging and status with her peers. I know she finds it calming and something she can control. It’s wonderful, too, that she’s finally grasped sunscreen’s role as a skin protector. I no longer struggle daily trying to land a decent layer of white stuff on their squirming, whining faces.

When I try to warn her off this obsession, she says: “I’m just looking after my skin, Mummy.” It’s a killer line and the beauty industry knows it. Earlier this year, Mecca co-founder Jo Horgan told a newspaper: “If girls are finding an opportunity to understand the value of their one skin, their one body, their one brain, and start looking after it from an early age, that’s something to be celebrated.” I’m sorry, but an SPF, a basic moisturiser, maybe a cleanser; those could be classed as self-care. A $40 lip balm is not. That’s exploitation.

But, of course, the “self-care” argument is another iteration of the long-running debate between ­feminists over the role of beauty. One side says beauty can be empowering, joyful, a vehicle of self-expression and self-care. The other says the beauty industry is an arm of patriarchal oppression – engaged in the manufacturing of insecurity and conformity. (In her fascinating book How to Be a Renaissance Woman, British historian Jill Burke reveals several highly educated Italian women were having this exact debate about 600 years ago.)

But the truth is that beauty is both these things, and while beauty ideals also affect men, women carry the greater burden because how we look has always formed a bigger chunk of our worth in a society where we’ve had a deficit of power. The beauty industry is all about compensatory consumption, a marketing psychology term that means buying things to fill a perceived sense of self-lacking. And this is what’s disturbing about the current craze. Tweens, and their under-developed brains, are sent the message that there’s something wrong with their (almost uniformly perfect) skin; that they need products to fix their “flaws”; that their natural beauty isn’t enough. Trying to mimic adults is a normal part of childhood, but focusing on your appearance is not an inherent part of girlhood. The whole thing is morally dubious, especially given the extensive evidence that the beauty and fashion industry’s marketing adversely affects the female sense of self-worth.

Outside Mecca, my slightly alarmed daughter told me that she didn’t need the lip balm right now. Relief. But then it appeared on her Christmas list, along with a Glow Recipe lip balm in Plum Plump flavour ($37) and a Laneige Divine Lip Duo set with two lip balms, one for night hydration and a Candy Cane-flavoured one “for extra kissable lips all day long” ($36). I haven’t spoken to Santa yet, but I think he’s thinking what I’m thinking: no 10-year-old could possibly need this many obscenely priced lip balms.

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