If you’re worried about tweens getting involved in skincare, then at least be grateful they have better options than Emma Clifton did when she was a ‘skincare tween’ with no internet to inform (or protect) her
The year was 1995 and I, 10 years old, had just got my first whitehead pimple. Even though there was no real internet, I already knew the difference between whitehead, blackhead and cyst pimples, because I was a tween and ‘pimples’ were covered by our available pop culture as if they were the greatest villains a teenage girl could know.
And you know what? They were.
The latest ‘oh no, who will think of the children?’ panic phase sweeping the internet is that girls as young as 10 are becoming obsessed with skincare and I have to tell you, this isn’t new. What IS new is the fact that these teens and tweens have all the information in the world at their fingertips, a luxury that my generation did not have.
This is where I found out about skincare:
- A physical print newspaper
- Terrifying Clean & Clear television ads
- Whatever my mum was using
- The giant ‘A Woman’s Guide To Health And Beauty’ book I asked for when I was 11 that I treated like an actual Bible
I would add ‘whatever my friends were using’ but the Clean & Clear/Clearasil industrial complex had such a chokehold on me and my peers, there was no difference to note. You were either using the Clean & Clear Three-Step Essentials (just Googled, the packaging has not changed a jot) or the Clearasil cleanser. You know the one.
Once you got older and if you were lucky like I was, and your tween pimples turned into full-blown teenage acne, you might get to know the Clean & Clear Deep Pore Cleanser. Or you might bring in the big guns of the T-Gel Neutrogena cleanser, which had the texture, smell and results of a product that treated your face like it was a crime scene that needed to be quickly decontaminated.
You want to talk to me about how it’s bad 12-year-olds know about RETINOL? At least they’re better off than the 12-year-olds of my generation, who would go straight to the St Ives Apricot Scrub and attempt to physically remove their pores on a twice-daily basis.
Full disclosure: I actually re-bought that St Ives Apricot Scrub when I was in my early 30s, for nostalgia, and damned if it wasn’t still incredibly satisfying to use. The smell! The texture! It really is the forbidden fruit of skincare.
After years of paint-stripping my face in the attempt to achieve clear skin, the real solution came when I was 18 (still no beauty internet to speak of), and my mum found an article in the NZ Herald, carefully cut it out, and we took it to the local pharmacy and came back armed with Cetaphil cleanser and Trilogy rosehip oil. That piece of newspaper probably saved the top layers of my teenage face, if I’m honest.
Once I had a bit more disposable income, I saved up all of my spare money from my university jobs and headed along to the nearest slightly fancier cosmetics counter, with yet another newspaper article as reference (by then I was an avid magazine reader but I guess the newspaper carried a factual heft I took very seriously?)
You know all these recent stories about how great, kind and well-educated the staff at Mecca and Sephora are at dissuading young people from buying crazy expensive products? Well, that didn’t exist for ol Muggins here. The woman behind the counter took one look at my now cystic acne and sensed my desperation, lining up a skincare collection that cost $400.
The fact that I can still remember this 20 years later shows you how much money it was – my current skincare range doesn’t cost that much – and I had to borrow money from my parents in order to afford it. In the end, it was basically a more expensive Clean & Clear Three-Step Essentials in better packaging and I slinked back to my Cetaphil and rosehip oil for the next decade, throwing in a sunscreen for good measure (thank GOD).
I know that we’re supposed to be clutching our pearls at the idea that tweens are growing up too fast by learning about skincare, but in the world of ‘not a girl, not yet a woman’, I would argue that skincare is the least offensive grown-up thing that our girls are researching.
I loved looking at the products on my nana’s bathroom shelf – Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream, Nivea Body Lotion – and on my mum’s – Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair, Lancôme Toner (bougie Mum??). They were little breadcrumbs leading to the the grown-up path I knew I’d one day be treading, and if my son follows in my cystic acne footsteps, then one day he’ll be learning about it to.
Of course, by then, it’ll probably be a hologram popping out of his Apple Glasses, educating him on some fancy skincare ingredient that hasn’t been invented yet, but I can rest assured in two things: that he will find his way, just like I did. And that the Clean & Clear Three-Step Essentials range will still exist, with absolutely no updates.
