It’s been more than six months, but these young girls are still obsessed by Sephora. It has become their thing, trend, a Gen Alpha trademark. They’ve invaded your local mall and your Tiktok feed. They create “skincare smoothies” using $120 testers, often destroying them in the process. They’re selling out products left and right, making supposedly young older teens and twenty-somethings feel like old fogies. Hello to the Sephora 10-year olds.

Even after the initial social media panic around them has died down, they don’t seem to be going away any time soon. So where did these beauty savvy, social media obsessed not even tweens come from? The shocking answer is: they didn’t appear out of nowhere, and in one form or another, they’ve always been here.

It may seem surprising to adults who yearn for the days of their youth, but kids can’t wait to grow up and do adult things. Young people have never waited for the socially acceptable green light to start imitating their parents, or worse, the parasocial people they see online. Every generation has some version of this panic around children growing up too fast, previously it surrounded teens having smartphones for the first time and questioning whether Disney Channel stars are good role models for kids both on and off screen. While these fears are rooted in real concerns: the skincare actives in products popular with Sephora 10-year olds are formulated for adults and can have adverse effects on young skin, the wider social media discourse surrounding this issue shows a disdain for women and girls that goes deeper than any retinol serum can.

The media landscape has always had a disdain for anything targeted towards women and especially young girls, and while culture has shifted with the widespread acceptance of the Barbie movie and the cultural reevaluation of the Twilight Saga, some habits are hard to break. Society has always been more critical of women’s interests over men’s, and the modern equivalent of this is the disproportionate shaming of women’s discretionary consumption compared to men’s. Even when not explicitly gendered, overconsumption is often measured using female-coded objects: clothes, shoes, household decor, and beauty products. While corporations and politicians have much more power to enact sustainability movements compared to the individual, especially in the beauty space women are still seen as the sole drivers of consumption.

When social media isn’t lambasting the Sephora 10-year olds themselves, they’re going after their mothers, questioning why they are allowing their children into Sephoras often unsupervised and letting them spend unacceptable amounts of money on unnecessary products. Ignoring the fact that in most heteronormative parenting situations, a father is also theoretically present and available to parent as well, Sephora 10-year olds are at the age where parents’ opinions start to matter less and are more influenced by their peers. Even in situations where the child is not mature enough to wander a shopping center unsupervised, many parents don’t have a choice due to the rising cost of child care and the lack of third spaces for children. This is further complicated by the fact that Sephora products aren’t cheap, and it’s very likely a child familiar with Sephora’s offerings comes from a higher-income background where one or both parents work long hours to maintain that high income, leaving less time to parent.

While some Sephora 10-year olds gained an interest in makeup and skincare from watching an older parent or sibling, the majority of these girls gained their expertise from Tiktok. It’s clear Tiktok has an outsized influence on Sephora 10-year olds compared to other social media networks because the Gen Alpha shoppers have an almost exclusive interest in Tiktok viral brands and products as opposed to the high-glam vanities of Instagram or the eyeshadow palette-obsessed indie brands that took over beauty YouTube post-Dramageddon. For better or for worse, this has democratized knowledge of what Sephora 10-year olds are buying, as well as opened them up to wider scrutiny in the public eye. Once again, these Sephora 10-year olds didn’t emerge via post-pandemic resocialization of children like some may believe. While their behavior may be worse compared to previous generations and their public platform is larger than ever, Sephora 10-year olds have always existed.

We only have to look back a decade ago to find evidence of the Sephora 10-year olds’ existence in the many amateur YouTube videos still archived on the site. Hopeful beauty gurus filming in their bedrooms experimenting with the large eyeshadow palettes that were the Drunk Elephant smoothies of their day. More accessible “age-appropriate” drugstore brands like essence and Makeup Revolution are on display here but so are mid-range brands like Morphe, as well as prestige brands like Anastasia Beverly Hills and Jeffree Star. Going even further back in time, magazines aimed at teens and tweens espouse makeup tips straight from celebrities and their makeup artists. These lookbooks and trend reports were often accompanied by product recommendations to “get the look”, and while the drugstore is also represented in this era, magazines leaned heavily towards luxury brands. In the age before mid-range and prestige price categories, magazines were recommending the $58 Dior eyeshadow palette worn by Miley Cyrus or the $23 Chanel lipstick worn by Britney Spears. For the inflation-curious, equivalent products today would cost $68 and $48 respectively.

Some may wonder where children below the legal working age (although possibly not for much longer) are getting the money to afford high-end makeup and skincare products. While in the United States there are exceptions for the agricultural and entertainment industries, Sephora 10-year olds can’t legally earn the money necessary to acquire the large vanities and/or dressers full of makeup and skincare.

An average of $390 worth of products shown per video, both directly featured or displayed on vanities. So while parents or caretakers were only present in 30% of the videos, the money is coming from parents or other adults in their life in the vast majority of cases. So while the adults can’t be blamed for the larger societal forces pushing these 10-year olds into shopping at Sephora and imitating the influencers they see on Tiktok, it is possible to examine what kind of adults can afford a large quantity of high-priced makeup and skincare over a relatively short amount of time, and whether we should compare adults in that income bracket to the general population.

High-earners and those able to make large shows of wealth for all the internet to see have always dominated social media algorithms. While the most recent breakdown of the YouTube algorithm available to the public claims that it favors watch time over click-through rate in order to avoid promoting “click-bait”, flaunting a large or expensive purchase in the thumbnail has been a proven method to not only draw in clicks, but gets the viewer to stay until the end to absorb every detail. Other social media sites don’t publicly publish their algorithm matrices, but the formula of attracting followers through projecting an extravagant lifestyle and aspirational spending pervades from Instagram pictures of celebrities posing with dozens of Gucci shopping bags to the popularity of multi-hundred dollar Shein hauls on Tiktok. YouTube juggernaut and veteran content creator consultant Matthew Patrick (better known as “MatPat” of the Theory channels) outlined the rise of the genre of escalation and excess as YouTube’s answer to competing with Tiktok. While the genre isn’t always explicitly about displaying wealth, within the beauty category examples include “Trying All the New Drugstore Launches” and “Full Face of Makeup from the Dollar Store”, the very nature of always needing to try every single launch or a completely new full face worth of makeup implies a financial ability to purchase a large volume all at once as opposed to trying one new product at a time or replacing products as they run out.

While the majority of this content is filmed in developed nations, that shouldn’t suggest that the majority of these countries’ citizens, or even a majority of the audience can afford to spend in the same manner as the influencers. A collection of policy briefs by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) outlining the global cost of living crisis shows that while wages have increased, they aren’t keeping up with the rise in inflation and households on the lower end of the earning scale have ceased purchasing luxuries entirely. Within the beauty category, only soap and shampoo are considered essentials, and while niche brands have thrived for many years only serving a very specific clientele, it’s a worrying sign for the overall health of the industry as a whole that brands are competing for a smaller, wealthier audience. Perhaps that’s the underlying force behind this embrace of Sephora 10-year olds and their excessive beauty collections, courting an audience that will buy a larger volume over a longer lifetime.