My 11-year-old and I were in the bathroom, rooting around for some nail polish remover or maybe some hair conditioner, when something on my shelf caught her attention. “You have Drunk Elephant,” she said, in the tone normally reserved by 11-year-olds for kittens or banoffee ice-cream. She was referring to an American skincare brand known for its minimalist packaging featuring bright pops of colour and pseudoscientific product names like “protini polypeptide cream” or “watermelon and niacinamide glow-up skincare set”.
Drunk Elephant, in case you don’t have a tween skincare guru in your life, was founded in 2013 by an American stay-at-home mother, Tiffany Masterson. Five years later, it had sales of close to $100 million. The year after that it was acquired by beauty giant Shiseido for $845 million (its sales have since fallen rather dramatically). It accomplished this by becoming extremely viral among millennials and a previously untapped market for skincare – children as young as eight and nine.
I’m not entirely sure how the brand made it into my bathroom, since my own skincare regime consists of a €17 pharmacy moisturiser and not much else. (This isn’t because I am immune to the beauty industrial complex, but because I have allergies that mean even the wrong brand of sunscreen is capable of transforming me into Elephant Man.) And yet, despite this – and despite the fact that my daughter does not have a smartphone or a TikTok account – here she was, #influenced.
It turns out she is coming to skincare relatively late. “Inside the Tween Obsession With Drunk Elephant Skin Care,” wrote Glamour magazine two years ago. “Sephora tweens are raiding Drunk Elephant – and we only have ourselves to blame,” says the Guardian. “‘Dystopian’: Skin Care for 4-Year-Olds Gets an Icy Reception,” reads a headline in The New York Times this week about a new skincare brand, Rini, which is going after the next untapped market. And in case you think that’s too young, Fisher Price has launched a “Mini Me Moments Self-Care Sensory Set”, which includes a toy jade face-roller and a chewy teether shaped like a gua sha.
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Masterson has reassured parents that Drunk Elephant products are safe and “designed for all skin, including kids and tweens”. But surely whether the products are safe or designed for young skin is not the point. The point is that no child of 11 – or, God forbid, 8 – needs a €50 face cream, or to be spending any time thinking about the size of their pores.
The beauty industrial complex – the network of corporations selling products, services, drugs, treatments, supplements and lotions which are designed to manufacture anxiety about our appearance and then flog us the “cure” – is wrapping its greedy maws around us younger than ever. The internet abounds with talk of “preventive Botox” and “prejuvenation” treatments.
Online, we are met with the glassy gaze of celebrities sporting what are politely called “new faces”: the most recent tales of reinvention preoccupying the internet include Miley Cyrus and Emma Stone. They are entitled to do what they like with their appearance, of course, but the hype around their supposed transformations is part of the same depressing phenomenon: that is to say, the creeping normalisation of the idea your face is like a winter coat, to be worn for a season and then upgraded.
Does it matter, you may wonder. Is my daughter wanting to experiment with skincare really so different from previous generations of little girls playing with their mother’s make-up?
Well yes, it is. Leaving aside the non-trivial matters of the suitability of some of these products for very young skin, there is a bigger problem. I’m all for adult women availing of the tweakments of their choosing, as long as they’re old enough to understand the costly, time-consuming and ultimately self-defeating pact they’re entering into. But once you start your preteen daughter down this road, you are signing her up to a lifetime subscription to the club of feeling never-quite-enough.
Meanwhile, women who “eschew cosmetic surgery” or, say, let their hair go grey – a dwindling tribe including the late Diane Keaton, Andie MacDowell and Frances McDormand – become objects of wonder and no small amount of envy. Our concept of a rebellious woman used to be someone who took up arms during the Easter Rising; now it’s Miriam O’Callaghan revealing she saves time by leaving her eye make-up on for a week.
A brilliant essay on this topic by an anonymous writer on Substack using the pseudonym Father Karine quotes the term “feminine narcissism” to explain the wheeze women have been sucked into. The phrase was coined in the 1970s by the philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky, who applied a feminist lens to the philosophy of Michel Foucault. Long before the age of social media or Botox or Ozempic, Bartky was alerting us to the way women fall prey to “internalised oppression” and what she called the “tyranny of slenderness”.
“An infantilised face must accompany her infantilised body, a face that never ages or furrows its brow in thought,” she wrote. “The face of the ideally feminine woman must never display the marks of character, wisdom and experience that we so admire in men.”
And so, while a Drunk Elephant Lala Retro Whipped Cream might be just a face cream, it’s also something more than that. In the hands of a tween, it’s an invitation to embark on the relentless cycle of self-scrutiny and comparison. So please don’t buy your 10-year-old skincare products for Christmas. The beauty industrial complex will be coming for her soon enough.
