Brittany Ouyang does not do much to perfect her three-year-old daughter’s skin, because it happens to be flawless already.

Her routine, if you can call it that, includes water, sunscreen and the occasional moisturiser.

So Ouyang was baffled when her sister sent her an Instagram post recently about a new skincare line that was advertised for children ages three years old and up.

She visited the website for the brand, which is called Rini and was cofounded by actress Shay Mitchell, and saw pictures of poreless children who looked to be 10 years old and younger beaming from behind jellylike face masks enriched with vitamin B12.

“That is ludicrous,” Ouyang, 36, who works in tech and lives near San Francisco, texted her sister.

She joined a chorus of people criticising the company with a post on TikTok: “What kind of capitalist hellscape are we living in?”

Nearly two years after a flurry of press about tweens swarming the aisles of beauty stores like Sephora, skincare lines for preteens and even younger children have become a robust product category – and a battlefield for parents and critics.

Households with children ages seven to 12 spent close to US$2.5bil (approximately RM10.4bil) on skincare last year, up from US$1.8bil (RM7.5bil) in 2022, according to data from NielsenIQ, a consumer research firm.

A growing list of companies offer skin products for preteens that are packaged in containers that look like candy dispensers and advertised with soothing assurances about gentle, dermatologist-approved ingredients.

Read more: In Malaysia and around the world, tweens are fast shaping the beauty industry

Most of these brands are targeting a demographic slightly older than the children who appear in Rini’s marketing materials.

Some, like Bubble Skin Care, which has been selling modestly priced moisturiser to tweens since 2020, and Evereden, a purveyor of melon-scented face wash and sunscreen sets, predated the “Sephora kids” craze.

Newer arrivals are thriving in a social media universe in which preteens demonstrate multistep skin routines for the camera.

In September, the debut of a 15-year-old influencer’s skincare line drew thousands of fans to a mall in New Jersey.

A new brand called Pipa, aimed at customers ages 7 to 12 years old, mails influencers its products in periwinkle boxes that say “Start young” on their lids.

These companies argue that young people who are already curious about skincare need safer alternatives to adult products that can damage sensitive, prepubescent skin.

Other observers see something more pernicious: a way to hook children on unnecessary products, laying the groundwork for ever-earlier anxieties about their appearances.

“Maybe in 20 years, every one-year-old will have a beauty routine,” said Ally Nelson, the host of a psychology and wellness podcast.

She was joking, mostly. The next day, she came across a Fisher-Price teething set that included a toy version of a sheet mask and a rattle shaped like a jade roller.

‘Very dystopian’

Nelson, 33, who lives in Toronto and has a toddler, said she could understand where these companies were coming from.

Young girls have long imitated their mothers by painting their nails or trying on lipstick – activities that tend to be treated as playful flirtations with adulthood.

There’s nothing wrong with a little experimentation, she said, but she worries that preteen skincare routines are allowing the beauty industry to gain a foothold in children’s lives.

A report released by Ulta Beauty last year found that members of Gen Alpha (those born after 2010) started experimenting with beauty products at an average age of eight years old – five years earlier than the generation above them.

“It does feel a little bit predatory,” Nelson said, describing Rini’s marketing imagery as “very dystopian”.

The company does not see it that way.

Mitchell, an actress who appeared in the teen drama Pretty Little Liars and founded the luggage company Beis, devised Rini with Esther Song, a fashion industry alumna and former chief marketing officer for the Parent Co.

In an interview with Elle, the two friends said they had decided to create the company after struggling to wipe face paint from their daughters’ faces after dance camp.

The brand’s introductory offering, sheet masks that retail for US$6 or US$7 (RM25 or RM29) each, come in puppy, panda and unicorn styles.

Through a representative, Mitchell declined an interview that would include questions about criticism of the brand.

In interviews, the founders of other skincare lines that cater to children and preteens said that they took seriously questions about age and appropriateness when developing their products.

Kimberley Ho, the CEO of Evereden, worked with three dermatologists to create the company in 2018, with the goal of providing gentle products for infants.

In 2021, after requests from parents, it introduced a limited number of items formulated for tweens, she said: sunscreen, a cleanser to wash it off and a simple moisturiser.

“With some newer brands, I think that what we’re seeing is, they’re developing products that kids may not necessarily need,” Ho said when asked about Rini.

Evereden, which reported US$100mil (RM414mil) in sales last year, now offers skincare packages for ages three years old and up, including a pale pink “Barbie” moisturiser and cleanser set that retails for US$63 (RM261).

“My eight-year-old calls this her ‘Barbie spa time’ and won’t go to bed without it now,” reads a testimonial the company highlights on its website.

Brooke Jeffy, a dermatologist in Scottsdale, Arizona, who introduced the skincare brand BTWN in 2023, worries that other companies have made compromises as the category has gotten more competitive in recent years, like adding fragrances that can irritate children’s sensitive skin.

She has resisted her marketing team’s suggestions to sell her products in more colorful packaging.

Read more: What do Gen Zs want in beauty? Cool brands, personal expression and inclusivity

Some dermatologists are not buying it.

Dedicated skin products for tweens may be safer than adult serums, but that does not mean children need them, said Molly Hales, a dermatologist and researcher at the University of Chicago.

“A young person who doesn’t have any known, diagnosable skin conditions doesn’t really need to be using products” beyond sunscreen, Hales said.

In an analysis published in June, she and other researchers found that girls on TikTok from the ages of seven to 18 years old were demonstrating skincare routines with an average of six different products, many of them risky for young skin.

Brands are most likely trying to capitalise on the popularity of such videos, she said, and insulating themselves from criticism using the fuzzy, unimpeachable-sounding language of “self-care”.

A beauty industry that specialises in monetising customers’ insecurities might just view children as the next untapped market, said Charlotte Markey, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and the author of books about adolescent body image. 

No matter how carefully they are formulated, skincare sets for kids send a message that “it’s really important to be on top of all these appearance trends, before you have even hit puberty”.

In her dream world, she added, children would hardly think about their skin at all.

“I’d so much rather they be colouring or something,” she said. – ©2025 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.