Skincare for tweens is booming. But they already look perfect… | Eva Wiseman

Our kids have embraced body positivity, but has diet culture merely been replaced by the quest for flawless skin?

I didn’t see the aurora, but I tried. At 10 or 11pm, I looked out of my bedroom window and squinted, and saw only darkness, but even so I found some lovely pleasure in it. The knowledge that something was happening in the sky, that all along my road people were standing in their gardens and angling their cameras towards the same big tree, and afterwards scrolling to see what they’d caught, sharing them on the street WhatsApp at midnight with pride. The next day, news sites reported on the northern lights as if they were young women getting out of cars – they “stunned”, “radiant”. I liked the way we were all united briefly in our lazy pursuit of beauty.

Elsewhere in my life, the search for beauty feels more treacherous. My daughter, 10 years old, went to a birthday party last week where she told me every other gift her little friend opened was a bottle of moisturiser. It should not have been a surprise, perhaps, having read about the rise of the “baby and child skincare market”, expected to reach $380m in market volume by 2028, but still, I found myself oddly troubled. I am fully and intimately aware of the lure of skincare, both the appeal of a daily routine (whether three or 15 steps, whether retinol or oil) and the sense it can give us of control in a time of chaos, but alongside that the capitalist creep, the repackaging as self-care, skincare as a kind of psychic protection, is something I know young girls might find particularly appealing. What troubled me the most in this instance, though, was the realisation that while my daughter and her friends are fully versed in the language of “body positivity”, understanding, for example, that diversity is a good thing and that fat bodies aren’t unhealthy, no such movement has really broken through about skin. In fact, as beauty journalist Jessica DeFino stresses, diet culture has been replaced by skincare culture.