May 21, 2026
I am not on TikTok, but I watch a lot of YouTube videos about TikTok. In fact, my YouTube homepage (which I recently upgraded to Premium so I can do ad-free viewing because I have a problem) is nothing but TikTok reactions, liberal propaganda, and video game reviews. In particular, I really like to fall asleep listening to Kiki Chanel. She is a blonde lady who bitches non-stop about TikTok influencers. Some notable episodes of her rants have been around TikTok moms feeding their children absurd amounts of food for clout, makeup influencers lying about products to make money from sponsorships, and rich influencers being generally out of touch and over-consuming while also begging for more money and free stuff/trips online. Clearly I am healing from a breakup and cannot be in a room alone with my thoughts for more than 10 minutes because I have watched/listened to about 50 of Kiki’s videos over the last couple weeks. Today I listened to one that really struck me – she called it “Why are 10 year olds taking over Sephora?”- which is honestly a good question and you probably understand it well if you’ve been inside a Sephora in the last year.
Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/MfGtaS8Ku1I?si=WDG2ajNzyr3EXD78
The whole premise of this Sephora video was that young girls between the ages of 8 and 12 are OBSESSED with skincare. They go to these high end (errr, at least I think Sephora is high end…I am more of an Ulta girl myself) makeup stores and wreak havoc. They destroy the tester products, are rude to the retail staff, and somehow convince their parents to buy them 100’s of dollars of products that their beautiful, elastic skin won’t be ready to receive safely for another 10-15 years. Now, hashtag not all 10-year-olds, but Kiki’s video features stories told by Sephora employees and customers who bring all the tea about the pre-teen drama in the store and the way the parents indulge some of these behaviors. She also showed some video commentary from a dermatologist who went through a pretty enlightening list of ingredients that can be found in some of the most “viral” (and expensive!) skincare products that the kids are purchasing with mommy’s Amex. Retinol was at the top of the list, along with collagen, peptides and a number of other ingredients that are, at worst, damaging to young skin and, at best, a colossal waste of money when used by children who don’t have the problems they are meant to target (wrinkles, dark spots, circles under eyes, redness, etc.).
Kiki was pretty judgmental of the parents. Which, like, yeah. If your kid is throwing a fit over being allowed to buy $900 of product at the counter or is being rude to the retail workers in the store – that’s pretty bad parenting. But as someone who spent the last year and some change being a pseudo step-mom to a 13 year old girl (see my previous post) and is also a rich auntie to a 12-year-old girl, I think I’ve fed into some of the social norms that grow these behaviors in some kids. I thought it was so cute to see how excited Cali Jo was over her 6-7 perfume from Sol de Janerio. There’s no telling how much money I dished out at Christmas time for my ex’s daughter’s makeup and skincare list. She wanted lip gloss, highlighter, fancy SPF, setting spray, leave-in conditioner, Summer Fridays, Sol De Janerio bum butter or something like that. Now, as a diamond Ulta member, I thought this was really fun and I enjoyed running down her list and trying to find surprises to add to it. But it’s hard not to contrast this 12-13 year old experience of today with the 2-in-1 Shampoo/Conditioner and Sea Breeze astringent (you know that shit that burned your face and that’s how you knew it was working?) my sister and I had in our bathroom.
When you really stop to think about it, children today are under immense pressure to consume. I think kids in my generation had some of this consumer pressure – but it was specifically around clothes and shoes and purses and other things you would wear or carry (Holister, American Eagle, Abercrombie, Nike, Uggs, Vera Bradley). That’s because your clothes and accessories were really the only outlet we had for expression and reception. You knew what was cool because you saw it literally on the bodies of the other kids around you. In other words, we were influenced physically by the people around us. Kids today still have that close influence from their friends at school, but they are much more influenced by social media. They leave school, go home and tune in to TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, and people they have never met tell them all the things that are “viral”. Then they gather at school and influence each other with the bias they got from social media before they even walked through the school doors. They still care about all the shit you can see with your own eyes in a classroom that we cared about as kids (only now its sweatshirts, Uggs again, Nike AirMax 270s? Birkenstocks, Nike tube socks, Stanley cups, etc.) but you also have to possess all kinds of things at home that no one else will ever even see in order to fit in (fancy shampoo, high end skincare, fancy makeup, perfume, heatless curlers, hair bonnets, etc.) The game of fitting in is the same, but the rules have gotten more complex and expensive. You aren’t just judged based on how you look – you’re judged based on what you HAVE.
Of course, this isn’t just about teens and tweens. Even as I write this, Kiki is in the background of my iPad complaining about over-consumption in adults due to fast fashion and the way we are constantly influenced to buy products online. We are constantly inundated by material goods we can choose, and often, the weight of choice is so heavy it can feel good to outsource it to an influencer. I watch a makeup influencer named Denita Barr who lives in West Virginia. I really like her because she always tells us “you need to be ugly as fuck, otherwise this won’t work” and then walks us through her makeup routine. She’s just being self-deprecating and funny when she says this, and her WV accent makes her seem really relatable to me. Plus she’s gorgeous. And you bet your ass that I went out and bought the exact same skincare line up she uses. Not because she’s a scientist who really knows if these things work or not (or are even safe) but just because she was handling the mental load of telling me what products to choose AND showing me how to use them. If you’re clueless, this is helpful. But tomorrow, if a different makeup influencer appeared in my feed and showed me a different lineup and had an even catchier opening line, what’s stopping me from switching and buying a whole new set of bullshit? Especially if I’m feeling insecure or not pretty that day. That’s the trap of overconsumption. “If you’re ugly as fuck, this product will help you.” To fall for that scam, you really have to believe you’re ugly as fuck.
It really is depressing. I don’t remember the exact moment when I was 10 or 11 and started to think about whether or not I was pretty or cool or fat…I just know that I’ve basically never stopped thinking about it in the 25 years since. Has a day gone by where I didn’t think about the way I look or the way I am perceived by everyone else? How many hours of my life have I lost trying to be better looking or skinnier or cooler? All of the influencer culture and over-consumption is driven by that phenomenon. If people feel insecure, they will do anything to fix the things they are insecure about. And the best part for the industry bottom line is that we are programmed to keep trying to fix these insecurities even if pattern recognition tells us that nothing money can buy will actually fix those problems. You tried the Drunk Elephant anti-aging cream and you still don’t feel pretty? Better buy that new Sober Elephant cream you saw in your feed today. You have hundreds of dollars of tools to curl your hair in a drawer at home and your mop just won’t hold a beachy wave? Better buy that 1000th new tool you saw on your timeline. Can’t lose weight even though you’ve tried 500 diets since your first one in 1998? Better buy that supplement you saw on TikTok because you heard Serena Williams uses it.
When you put it all like that, why are we shocked that Gen Alpha is buying all of these products to make themselves prettier/younger/better-smelling/cleaner? They learned this shit from us. They didn’t learn about the products from us – but they learned how to worry about whether or not they are pretty, young, good-smelling, clean, thin from US. We held onto our insecurities so tight for decades just so we could pass them down to the next generation. Tie that up with ever-present corporate greed and predatory sales practices, and voila! You’ve got 10 year olds in Sephora. I think the 10 year old girls need some justice. They didn’t destroy those Sephoras. We did.
I don’t have the answer. I guess we need to talk to our kids and tell them all the things we wish we could go back and tell the 10 year old version of ourselves. And maybe we should have these conversations outside and far away from a screen….and far away from the Amex.
Cluelessness is the Mother of Invention 