The Pretty Little Liars actress Shay Mitchell recently debuted a new brand made specifically for children. Rini is a skincare brand offering face masks for kids as young as 3 years old. Her new venture, Mitchell said at the launch, teaches children “self-care.” But, for many, the emergence of the children’s skincare market raises a far bigger question: do such brands need to exist at all?
Now generating $100 billion in direct spending power annually, Gen Alpha poses a lucrative opportunity for entrepreneurs looking to break into the business of marketing to the youth. Following the “Sephora kids” trend that filled the headlines almost two years ago, revealing the extent of children’s and teens’ rising interest in the beauty and skincare category, several new players in this new market appear to have recognized a space of opportunity: a fast-growing market of impressionable, digitally native kids.
Brands like Everdeen, Rini, Bubble, Pipa Skin, among others, are now full-speed capitalizing on the commercial opportunity by carving out a new category never seen before: skincare products for small children. These children’s skincare brands rather obviously deploy aesthetically pleasing branding and color psychology – through pink, orange, red, and yellow as well as pastel palettes – to make their products appealing to young kids and, in particular, to young girls.
It might be argued that these products’ aesthetic and, in some cases, toy-like design encourages children to see skincare as wellness-oriented play. But it’d be all too naive of us to completely overlook how subliminal branding choices function to fundamentally condition and effectively systemically groom unsuspecting children into becoming dutiful consumers at a younger age. By using marketing to manufacture desire for items that kids have never needed before the era of social influencing – and that might be not only unnecessary but could be harmful to their minds and bodies – brands are capitalizing on their innocence.
Seen through this lens, the trendy packaging of children’s skincare hides a different story: one that raises questions of the meaning of ethical marketing and, more specifically, the marketing industry’s contribution to the overall state of teens’ mental and medical health. This intensifying commercial investment in children’s appearance management (since most dermatologists say children don’t actually need such elaborate skin products) forms the backdrop for a broader cultural shift in which algorithmically-driven content across social media has begun to fundamentally re-shape children’s practices, aspirations, and wants at an increasingly early age.
According to BCG, US teenagers now begin purchasing beauty products at an average age of 12 – roughly a year earlier than a decade ago – and approximately 75% of teen girls engage with beauty content at least once per day. Furthermore, 79% of children aged 7-17 have asked a parent to purchase a beauty product they’ve seen on social media, and 31% of parents say their child self-describes themselves as being “obsessed” with a particular skin care brand.
Source: The Benchmarking Co.,(August 2024). Survey of 2,600+ parents about the beauty and personal care habits of their children, ages 7-17. Global Cosmetic Industry.
This issue extends beyond normalizing beautification rituals among minors. Using social media to target children as consumers with unnecessary and potentially detrimental products conditions both prepubescent and adolescent youth to internalize consumption as a gateway into normative cultural ideals. Rather than encouraging children to appreciate who they are and question our society’s fixation with physical looks, we are effectively passing down generational baggage from previous cohorts of women whom the advertising media similarly trained to focus on “fixing” our natural bodies while trying to appear as youthful and perfect as is humanly possible.
Founders claim that these new brands exist to provide children with safe alternatives, but it should be stated plainly here that it’s now become all too common to deflect criticism of deep-seated cultural issues by appealing to notions of individual “empowerment” or “self-love.” And if the defense of these emerging brands is, indeed, that this new sector in the market simply caters to children’s natural curiosities and desire to “do what mommy does,” then nothing is seemingly off limits. Because capitalism as a system operates without inherent ethical constraints, it should be entirely unsurprising when even more brands enter this new market with additional child-targeted products: from deodorants and make-up kits to bodycare, or, who knows, even shaving items branded as “gentle” enough for kids experiencing early puberty. One is forced to ask: what’s next?
Taken altogether, this is only one example that reveals a longstanding ethical void in the industry, where profit motives routinely supersede considerations of ethics in business, the social impact impact of brands, and the subsequent effect on developmental well-being of youth exposed to advertising communications that manufacture desire for new commodities. And none of it is new, of course.
Youth are already routinely positioned as highly malleable consumers, often exploited for profit with no regard for the societal harm the marketing and advertising industries has caused over the decades. Examples of these ethical lapses in the industry abound. Vaping products have been intentionally marketed to vulnerable teens. Teen-fashion retailers have long marketed clothing to minors in ways that valorize thin body types and openly sexualize young women in an abhorrently objectifying manner. Then there are brands of energy pouches and sugary drinks that frequently target adolescents – and even those in early-teens – contributing to public health risks, despite medical warnings. What’s tragic about it all is how normalized it is in the corporate world.
With children spending more time on social media than ever before, however, marketing and brand leaders can no longer claim to be unaware of the ways in which brands influence developmental norms, bodily self-perception, self-esteem, and the ongoing socialization of youth into a cult of hyper-consumerism. While parents work to shield their kids from these harms, the younger generations directly consume digital media like never before. Therefore, protection of children should be a regular topic of discussion in the marketing industry – and yet, it isn’t. Why not? Consumption is, of course, profitable, so the calls for critical consciousness in the industry are too often minimized and even ridiculed, mocked, and shunned upon by its veterans.
It should be unsurprising then, that, over the last few years, the industry has conveniently sidelined the idea of so-called “purpose,” advocating for a return to things like “real humor” and “sexy advertising.” In doing so, we have made the mistake of conflating debates about positioning with ethics, abandoning any pretense of responsibility to anything other than the rule of capital. Lest we forget the age-old wisdom of the market, we’re told: if it sells means it’s working, so why bother thinking about anything else?
The views expressed in this column are those of the author, Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel – a cultural theorist, social critic, and award-winning author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers: Building an Inclusive Marketing Strategy (2024) – and do not necessarily reflect the views of Brand Innovators.
