Earlier this year,  Sephora goers shared stories on TikTok of encountering 10-year-olds in Sephora.  Their stories often include mention of arguing with said 10-year-old to get the last item in stock. One customer said she needed to buy an item on the Drunk Elephant aisle, and a 10-year-old beat her to it. The 10-year-old offered a trade. She would give her the item in exchange for the expensive ring she was wearing that day. 

This is just one of many stories shared throughout social media. Even Sephora employees have been sharing how these children are rude and have also been messing up and breaking the samples that Sephora offers. 

Many have been sharing concerns that parents should be watching what their child buys and how it can affect them at a young age.  These kids are still too young to be trying out acids and different types of chemicals on their skin, which could cause a common outcome of skin scarring and allergic reactions. Having a younger sister, I can clearly see the overabundance of make-up she’s buying and applying to her skin; she keeps constantly buying more due to the products she hears about on TikTok. Understandably, young girls want to buy beauty products because someone else has it. We’ve experienced that in our childhoods at some point, but buying and applying chemicals that are damaging long-term should not be an option open to the child. However, this brings into question the parents’ role in all of this.

 Parents have been taking their children into stores, watching them buy items meant for mature people, without saying anything. If the kid is disrespectful to the employee the parent does not comment on it. Some of the children are even unsupervised and proceed to destroy the samples Sephora employees carefully arrange. It has gotten to the point where stores have stopped putting up samples and have barred children below 14 or 15 from making a purchase.

Parents can introduce their children to certain products but they should also recognize the harm that these products can do to long-term skin health. In addition, they need to be less permissive and more attentive. It doesn’t have to be anything extreme but even just setting a budget on how much a child can spend can be a good first step.

Sephora isn’t cheap and some kids go above and beyond and spend a bunch of money on products that are not made for their skin, however, some parents simply don’t care about their child’s physical well-being, which is terrible because the kids are not able to make informed decisions about these products so if the parent does not protect them their child could sustain permanent damage. 

Unfortunately, Sephora is not the only example of this type of behavior, we also see it in TV series and books. Such as the show “Euphoria,” which is an intense and weighing show, that talks about heavy topics like drug addiction, and self-harm. While these topics can tastefully be shown and or explained to a child, much of this kind of media is directed toward older audiences and as such is too extreme for children to readily absorb. Another example is the book “ICEBREAKER”, the painted and colorful cover may look like an innocent love story about an ice skater and a hockey player, but in reality, it describes a lot of sexual contact between the two characters. Kids do not need to be reading sexually explicit content at a young age still, many parents let their children buy it because the cover art looks innocent. I do want to mention that the adult may not always be at fault as some kids know exactly what the book is about and are taking advantage of their parents in order to access that kind of material.

My point still stands: parents should help their children not be so easily influenced by social media, where the kid feels like they have to have the same product just because everyone else has it. It is obviously a normal experience but without proper parenting children are being left susceptible to possibly damaging and life-threatening products. Instead, kids should be able to fully enjoy their childhood without worrying about becoming the next Kylie Jenner or Andrew Tate. I remember when I was younger, some of my friends would always say that they couldn’t wait to grow and be able to make more decisions on their own without having to have so much supervision from their parents. Now that they’re older they all want to be kids again and take more advantage of those kindergarten nap times. If parents aren’t more mindful of what their child buys, watches, and reads then kids will lose an important developmental period of their life and end up as teenagers stuck in a child’s body.