Tik Tok Is Sephora, We Are All 10 Year Olds

As girls, we are bound by the unspoken law that to become women, we must hate ourselves. This is not new information to you, and yet we act surprised when we see ten year olds spending their parent’s money at Sephora. 

There’s a sentiment circling tiktok and twitter that young girls are buying swaths of anti-aging products–grabbing them off the shelves like rabid puppies. The name “Sephora 10-year-old” has joined the likes of “iPad kid” and “participation trophy” to denote a wrong way of being a child. 

I wonder what we, as a generation of habitual posters drowning in our own capitalistic excrement, expected kids to do.

Instead of seeing young girls buying Drunk Elephant as a massive failure of every wave and style of feminism, we are seeing it as an opportunity to do what we’ve always done exceptionally well–shame and condemn young girls. 

It is easy to look at the parents of Sephora 10-year-olds and place blame, unleash our rage, compare their children’s behavior with ours when we were young girls. This rage is justified, but misplaced. 

As women online, we are inundated with newly accessible beauty–it is no longer Hollywood that sets the standards, but our friends, people we know, and people that have been algorithmically chosen to appeal to us as individuals. Beauty, it seems, is closer and easier to achieve than ever.

But, and here’s the trick, in order to reach it, we must consume, en masse, moisturizers, serums, retinol, retinoid, vitamin E, C, D oils, sprays, gels, creams, jade rollers, eye covers, mouth tape (yes mouth tape), a specific kind of pillow, a specific kind of pillow CASE, hair rollers, wraps, wrinkle reduction patches. We have to sleep on our backs, we have to drink THIS when we wake up, and THIS before we go to bed (to reduce inflammation.) We have access to beauty now, right? It’s so close and so easy. I just have to watch a tiktok telling me where to buy it.

We must consume to fill the gaps that imagined wrinkles leave under our eyes, beside our mouths. We must prevent age at all costs, because look, that’s what this girl just like me is doing, and I don’t want to fall behind. 

This sentiment is hard-wired into women and girls, haunts my every waking moment, and has held the consumer driven market by the hair and led it into the 21st century: We must value our physical appearance, as it is the currency we exchange for love. As much as we’re actively and intentionally changing that, this is the reality sold to us in perpetuity. 

Tiktok is Sephora. We are all 10 year olds. 

Now, in diving into this topic I went back and inspected my own prepubescent behavior. What was my tether to sanity when I was 10 years old? What did I cling to before I watched a hundred Michelle Phan makeup tutorials and sold my soul to the devil? 

The answer, my sweet reader, is bands. 

I was a girl who was deeply insecure, and loving bands–identifying myself as a fan–allowed me to access something purposefully kept from me. 

When we listen to a band we love as young girls, we are able to start defining ourselves by something outside what we must, according to the algorithm, physically control–something that makes us feel good that doesn’t have anything to do with our appearance or purchasing power. 

What’s happening now is that the algorithm has shown these Sephora 10-year-olds who to identify with. Exploration and joy has been taken from this choice, outsourced to AI. It is no longer a connection with music or art pr something outside the self, but a connection with a suggested way of being. Identifying with people who create “content” for a platform made to sell ideas in 3 minutes or less is an incredibly dangerous practice. 

I do not think that tik tok is the root of all evil, only that evil thrives when we give a platform. When we allow an algorithm to present us with an identity, sell us beauty, promise love, I don’t think we get to condemn 10 year olds at Sephora.

We’re the problem, not them.