Sad story about marketing cosmetics to tweens. The overall system is designed for frictionless consumption. Points of friction like needing ID to buy things that could potentially be harmful to a tween would never be popular. There is also the business of parents being unable to prevent limitless social media access though they could easily prevent irresponsible use of their credit cards.
..tweens have been spending increased amounts of time on social media since being cooped up during the pandemic.
They're among the biggest consumers of some social media platforms, says Shah, founding director of Georgia State University’s Social Media Intelligence Lab. All that social media time is, in turn, exposing these young users to influencers paid by brands to use and promote beauty and skincare products. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms also feed this exposure, serving users recommendations about beauty tips and influencers after just a few searches on the topic.
Add to this mix the fact that tweens are known to be concerned about how they look – and you have the perfect storm. "Tweens are preoccupied with personal appearance. They’re very, very self-conscious in terms of how their growing bodies are going to turn out and about their developing self-identity," says Shah. "There’s a lot of sensitivity around that and that’s existed for decades. And these two factors combined are what's really driving the sales in these younger demographics.”
Being all too familiar with parental guilt myself, I can see how it's expiation could take the form of letting your kid spend money without asking too many questions. A lot of people I have worked with over the years have recounted how their kids go on shopping sprees and they indulge it because they don't have any capacity to give them time and attention - that has to be compressed into the few weeks of vacation every year. The rest of the time its about keeping your head above the water so the family can enjoy the standard of life they have grown used to.
Sadly (but unsurprisingly) marketers have found a selling opportunity arising from the confluence of consumerism and dysfunction at the family level which is driven in large part by need to keep making money at all costs because people cannot count of either the government or their employers for anything. The Sephora tween trend is a symptom of all that is broken around us and how that brokenness creates revenue opportunities for businesses making them behave in ways that makes things worse for all concerned.
Being forced to chase and unreal and unattainable standard for beauty as a tween is tantamount to robbing a person of those years of their life where they are supposed to be go back and forth between childhood and youth until they feel confident to leave childhood behind. That is a meaningful rite of passage that these kids will not get to have.
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