There Are No Girls on the Internet - Your kid doesn’t need $70 face cream 

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Is Drunk Elephant the new Barbie? Skincare is at the top of the holiday wish list for tweens, even though there’s no need for it. And social media might be part of the reason why. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and UnBossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So now that it's the holiday season, we know that means gift-giving.

And I had kind of a big shock when I was talking to the tween girl in my life, my little cousin, and I asked her, what are some things that she might want for the holidays as a gift? She's rattling off all of these normal, age-appropriate things. And then she said one of the things that she wanted was a $70 thing of drunk elephant peptide face cream. It's not just the price, although $70 for a face cream for an 11-year-old is a bit much. It's also that it's a peptide face cream. If you don't know, peptides are meant to give your skin more elasticity, but your skin loses as you age. It's not really the kind of thing an 11-year-old would ever need for their skin.

They're for skin like mine. So this left me thinking, when did tweens and very young people start feeling like they needed or wanted, you know, complicated multi-step skincare designed to combat things like wrinkles? This is absolutely a thing now and social media is to blame. But if you ask me, maybe not on the way that you're thinking. Let's get into it. So this trend actually has a name. Young people who have been influenced by platforms like TikTok and Instagram to be obsessed with skincare are known as Sephora. kids. And there are a lot of Sephora kids out there because younger folks are into skin care right now.

Here are some stats. Households with tweens aged 6 to 12 spent almost $2.5 billion on facial skin care last year, an annual spending increase of 27 percent, more than double the average. Writer Alexandra Demar wrote about this for the New York Times and a piece called toxic beauty standards can be passed down. She writes about how one of her friends who was in the fashion industry told her that in her local mother's group chat, nearly every single mom had skincare, skin care, skin care, as the top thing on the holiday list they were given by their fifth graders. Her 10-year-old daughter does not even have access to social media,

but she says that she's exposed to this skincare obsession through friends who are copying TikTok beauty influencers and whose parents are buying these products for them, things like acids, peals, and toners. Even though many of these products are just not meant for their skin, they're meant for aging skin or acne-prone skin. not the kind of perfect skin that somebody who is 10 or 11 probably has. There was even this entire thing a couple of months ago where adults were filming kids going

into Sephora's and Ulta beauty stores and sort of run in wild stocking up on expensive products. I felt like that entire trend had a little bit of a darker undercurrent to this discourse. First of all, just in general, adults should not be out there filming kids on their phone, just full stop, end of sentence. but I also picked up this kind of undercurrent of, I don't know, this feeling of being a bit territorial, like, hey, why are these youth muscling in on the Sephora, which should be territory for grown women? But where do you think these kids are learning about how to obsess over skin care? You know, it's one of those things like an after school special. I learned it from watching you.

Kids are coming of age on the internet, the same internet that we adults are using. And that is where this skincare obsession is stemming from. Now, it probably doesn't surprise you to find out that social media is part of what is fueling this youth desire for a complicated multi-step skincare routine. But you don't have to take my word for it. There is a documented link between young people obsessing over their skin care and social media use. According to psychology today, a 2018 study by Che J vow that pressure to conform to beauty standards increases the likelihood of engaging in skin care routines. influencers promote products promising clear skin, driving teens to purchase them and achieve similar results.

And their use of social media to fuel these concerns about their skin and skin care does come with negative impacts. A study from Tickerman and Slater found that exposure to idealized images on social media can negatively affect body image, particularly for young women and girls. Clear glowing skin has become a symbol of beauty and confidence. But when teens don't meet those idealized standards, especially when it comes to acne, They may feel inadequate, which can lower self-worth. Skin care routines, often marketed as confidence boosting, can have the opposite effect when teens don't see immediate results or experience breakouts.

The pressure to achieve perfect skin can actually worsen insecurities. And lastly, you know how easy it is to conflate skin care with self-care more generally, where you feel like if you spend a bunch of money on skin care products, you can actually convince yourself that you're taking good care of yourself, if you're me anyway? Yeah, so that dynamic definitely got me, even at my big age, and youth are not immune to it either. Because a survey from 2021 found that 58% of teens see skin care as an important form of self-care, and many are turning to it to manage stress or boost their mood. In the earlier days of the pandemic, many teens use skin care to feel more in control and reduce their anxiety, which now, that is not inherently a bad thing, but skin care is just not the same thing as self-care or control. And buying a bunch of pricey products to do a 10-step skincare routine to get glowing glass skin is not really the same thing as self-care.

And I do think this is something that youth are really getting from us adults. Like we're passing down some not great attitudes and ideas about what self-care really is and what it looks like. I agree that some of this really took root in those early pandemic days when we were all just trying to do whatever to cope. The New Yorker's Gia Tolentino really breaks it down well. She writes, The Sephora Twins, for their part, seemed to be borrowing some of the self-care language that was dominant in the adult beauty world

two presidential election cycles ago. According to this line of thinking, taking care of your face is a way to luxuriate in personal pleasure and exert control over your life. But adults have largely moved on from all that. No one is fooling anyone by quoting Audrey Lord in blog posts about lip balm anymore. The earnest language of corporate approved wellness,

disappeared from the mainstream somewhere around 2020, along with the figure of the girl boss, who often relied on that language. The mood regarding beauty and also culture, politics, and whatever it is we're all doing, is raw, pragmatic, aggressive. The deference to brute material reality comes a lot faster these days.

So I absolutely agree with this. You know, most adults are not talking about skin care as wellness or self-care anymore. By now, most of us can pretty clearly see the ways that that was pretty obviously and quickly co-opted by brands and corporations to just get us to buy more crap and keep feeling bad. So I think we kind of moved on from that

around the same time that people decided to move on from the pandemic. But it still has this lasting, lingering cultural impact for youth. And I just think it's important to ask, what are the dynamics that we have been fostering in our youth and are they actually serving our youth or just setting them up for more unhealthy, toxic standards, masked as care? Because they deserve so much better.

We all do. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

You love me. I need something to you. to make me seem funny. And we're back. So all these studies about youth and skin care are kind of just telling us what we already know. Because all you need to do is scroll TikTok or physically go into an Ulta or a Sephora

to see what I'm talking about. But we can't talk about Sephora kids without talking about the brand Drunk Elephant. The pricey but worth it, Lux brand Drunk Elephant is one of the top brands tweens say they want. Ariana Yaptenko at Glamour Magazine did a poll around their offices

and found that the staffers who had daughters, nieces, and younger cousins were basically obsessed with this brand. Parents flooded Instagram with questions about the safety of ingredients like peptides, acids, and retinoles on youthful skin. On TikTok, the hashtag Kids at Sephora has more than 5 million views

featuring videos of drunk elephant kids wreaking havoc on tester products in the stores. So social media is definitely a big part of what's going on here, but some of this isn't new, right? because when I was a tween decades ago, I also loved skincare. I mean, I almost feel like care is not the right word here. It was more like skin punishment. If you live through that era, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

My routine was that I would wash my face with that facial cleanser that had those little scrubbing microbeads in them. Remember those to like exfoliate your skin? Not only did it completely rip up your skin and tear it apart, I can only assume I'm still carrying those. microplastic beads in my blood as we speak decades later. Then I would use Sea Breeze as a like astringent or a toner, which if you use Sea Breeze, I feel like you can probably smell how it smelled as we speak. So I would soak a cotton ball in Sea Breeze and just rub this burning acid all over my face. Maybe I would finish it off with one of those stridex or oxy pads across my face too, just to make sure it was nice and dried out. You know, you really want to just like dry out. You know,

your skin by putting a bunch of alcohol just right on there. For some reason, I think I also used to put toothpaste on my pimples. I don't know where I heard that. I think somebody in my school said that you're supposed to do that, so that's what I did. Anyway, what I'm saying is that it was a rough time for Bridget's skin, but here was the thing. I was just picking these things up at the drugstore or the grocery store or my parents would take me. They were not $70 a pop, and as rough as this routine was on my skin, I wasn't doing any real lasting damage because there is a reason why skincare that is designed for more mature skin is different than the skin care an 11-year-old should be using. The kind of active chemical ingredients in skincare design for mature skin,

things like acids and retinol and glycolic acid can be very bad for the sensitive skin of a young person. But even beyond the fact that these products are not designed for children, an 11-year-old does not have wrinkles or crow's feet or smile lines. So when a product aimed at preventing these kinds of things is on the very top of an 11-year-old's holiday gift wish list, what is really going on? So there is a ton of criticism of brands like Drunk Elephant, that they might be intentionally

marketing their products to kids when these products are not met for kids and they're not even really safe for kids to be using. Tiffany Masterson, the founder of Drunk Elephant, has even addressed this directly. She told the New York Times, I designed Drunk Elephant for all skin, including that of my own children, and the majority of our skin, hair, and body products are appropriate for and compatible with skin of all ages.

This is backed by clinical data. Based on the number of questions we've received on this topic, we created an Instagram post with recommendations of what is safe for prepubescent skin under 13. We do not recommend children under 13 use acids like retinol or vitamin C. The detractors are referring to products that contain acids, and rightly so. Kids and tweens don't need acids. If you have concerns, we recommend consulting a pediatrician or pediatric dermatologist

before introducing new products into your child's routine. So they also addressed criticism that they intentionally market their products to kids. She says, I've been reading that I chose the colors and packaging to target children. This couldn't be further from the truth, and the truth is never quite as interesting.

But I chose the colors and packaging because it happened to be my aesthetic. I actually never even considered targeting any demographic, and that's what made my brand so different from the start. So on that point, I don't know if I fully have. agree. I actually think if anybody, she was trying to target millennials because her packaging is these pastel pinks and turquoises and blues that really speak to the sort of millennial aesthetic.

I also just don't know that she is that bent out of shape about the fact that her products are very popular with children and they're like hot pink colored, right? I don't know that it was an intentional choice, but I don't think that they're crying any tears over the fact that it's what made their brand so popular is this youth demographic. So I kind of have to push back a little bit on what she's saying here. But if she's taken at her word, and these are not products that she's intentionally marketing to kids, why do kids end up with Lux Skin Care like Drunk Elephant on their holiday wish list? So I actually think there's a kind of cultural collapse happening online that is responsible for this. Here's my theory on what I think is going on. So yes, I do think this is just

standard social media, causing kids to want things that really are not for them and, you know, youth just generally wanting to feel older than they are, which is a totally normal young person thing that we all went through. I went through that. You went through that is a thing that young people do. But I also think something else is going on here too. I think it's the lack of digital third spaces for youth online. The same TikTok that I go to when I want advice on how to use retinol without causing irritation on my skin is the exact same TikTok that my 11-year-old cousin is using. So if you're an 11-year-old who's into beauty and skin care as a hobby, which there's something wrong with that, there's not really an age-appropriate space for you to go to explore

what skin care should look like for somebody your own age, let alone a place where you're not being constantly sold a product when you consider how ubiquitous things like TikTok shop have become. And I think it really comes down to kids needing their own corners of the internet for exploration because when they don't get that, they end up being shaped by the same internet experience as me, a grown adult woman. But the thing is, I'm an adult, so I have the ability to understand and see that, like, TikTok skincare influencers might be using filters or lighting to make their skin look glassy and perfect to get me to buy skincare that they then might get a financial cut of. Like, I'm old enough to understand and see all the machinations at play, even though it doesn't always

save me from buying skincare I'll ever use. And for youth, it's like that insecurity is being further monetized and cashed in on. So that's what I think is actually going on here. But what happens when your kid gives you their holiday wish list and it has these expensive skincare items that they don't really need on it? Like, what are you meant to do as a parent? Well, one, I think education is a huge part of it. And Sephora stores now say they're doing a much bigger push around in-store education of young consumers on what their skin actually needs. Now, maybe kids are not going to be swayed by this. If the cool girls at school are all using $70 peptide cream for their non-existent wrinkles, they're probably still going to want it. But helping them understand that at a

young age, what their skin really only needs is like a gentle cleanser, a moisturizer, and a sunscreen, and that anything else might actually be making their skin worse. But if your kid wants fancy skin care because they have an actual skin issue, you should be talking to a professional dermatologist or doctor. That's another thing about the skincare hobby experience on the internet. I am on subreddits like skincare addict on Reddit where everybody is diagnosing other people's skin, right? People will send in pictures of a skin issue and ask what they should be buying

or what they should be doing to fix it. Now, generally, it's pretty humdrum stuff like dry skin, but sometimes people will have a picture of like a pretty gnarly looking skin infection and the only answer should be talk to a doctor. So you have adults asking another non-doctor adults to address what sometimes is like a medical, issue, that's not a dynamic that is always great for adults. You know, we navigate it. However,

it's certainly not a dynamic that kids should be mixed up in online. And I also think it's more of a media literacy conversation. You know, we should be talking to the youth in our lives about how influencers maybe are not always being honest about the impact different products have had on their skin and how they might also be making money off of us clicking by. More generally, I think it's about having conversations about who you should trust on the internet and the importance of independently verifying health information from the random people that they see online. This is especially true for youth because research is very clear that more and more, youth see influencers as their friends. And so if they have a parisocial relationship with a skincare influencer on TikTok,

they're not going to see this as somebody who gets a cut if you hit by. They're going to see this as my friend is recommended I use this skincare product. So that level of media literacy I think is very important, especially for youth online. online. But beyond all that, I also think there is this need for a deeper examination of what it is we are all passing down to our youth, what attitudes, what concerns, what cultures we are passing down because I worry that we might be passing down some toxic attitudes without even really realizing that our youth is being impacted by this. Like, are we as adults obsessing about our skin and our wrinkles and our age in these ways that signal to you?

youth that the normal process of aging is something to be afraid of, to be concerned about, rather than to celebrate. There was this video where, I think, a 28-year-old woman posted a video of her face, and she was like, this is my face without Botox or filter or makeup. Like, this is what somebody in their late 20s looked like. She looked completely normal and regular and fine, like just a regular person's face. Nothing weird about it. So either of the comments, it was like a A couple of sets of comments. One was like, oh my God, so brave, so brave to like have a human face and show it on this internet in 2024. Which, you know, definitely I think that's well-meaning, but I don't like living in a world where it's just brave to exist on the internet with a human face without a filter on it or without Botox in it. So didn't love that. But also you had younger people being like, this is why I use retinol, even though I'm 15.

like I don't want to look like this. This is so sad, yada, yada, yada. And it just made me wonder if kids and young people have been so tricked by social media filters that they no longer know what a human person's face looks like. I do think that social media makes it harder to have a good sense of what people look like as they age. And listen, take it from me. Aging is a gift. Not everybody gets to get to the age or they get to have wrinkles and smile lines.

And if you get to get there, it's a good thing. It's something to be celebrated. There's no shame in wanting to have smooth, clear skin, but we shouldn't be demonizing the normal process of aging in the process either. And so maybe it's not surprising that the holiday season, you know, this time of sky-high expectations and unreasonable demands, is also a time when harmful beauty ideals can really thrive and spread to the heads of young people like the whispers of sugar plum berries. All that to say, however, the bottom, bottom

line is that you should not spend $70 on skin care for an 11-year-old. I will not be spending $70 on skin care for an 11-year-old. If you are my cousin listening to this, I love you dearly. You know you're my girl, but you're not getting that skincare. Pick another gift. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. human.