Why the presence of children in Sephora is alarming – 02/03/2024 – Equilíbrio

Consumers of beauty products, adults and teenagers, have been increasingly complaining on social media that girls under 12 years of age are invading luxury cosmetics stores, such as Sephora and the American Ulta Beauty.

On TikTok and Instagram, the hashtags #sephora and #sephorakids reveal the conflict in full force.

They show messy stores and product counters and describe invasions by young consumers who were allegedly rude to other customers and employees.

Complaints report that girls even snatch products from the hands of other shoppers, as shown by a TikTok user.

The specific brand of the product in question is Drunk Elephant (“Drunk Elephant”, in Portuguese), which Glamor magazine recently called an “obsession among girls aged 10 to 12”.

Many of these social media posts went viral.

They demonstrate that the alpha generation (born since 2010) is purchasing products that contain ingredients like retinol, powerful exfoliating acids, expensive humectants, dyes and serums designed to minimize the effects of aging — that is, products traditionally aimed at older consumers .

The Japanese conglomerate Shiseido purchased in 2019, for US$845 million (around R$4.16 billion), the Drunk Elephant brand — which defines itself as “clean beauty” (“clean beauty”, in Portuguese), cosmetics market free from ingredients such as sulfates, silicone, parabens and dyes, not tested on animals and with more sustainable packaging.

The brand reacted to all this attention by explaining on Instagram last December which of its products would be specifically recommended for children.

As marketing campaigns and beauty influencers lure consumers into cosmetics aisles, kids are actually invading stores and taking home all the hyaluronic acid their little hands can carry, as social media users and apparent popularity suggest. of the products?

“Yes, children are not just invading Sephora stores. They are making a lot of purchases of these products online”, according to marketing professor Denish Shah, from the Robinson School of Business at Georgia State University, in the United States. “This category, overall, is seeing a huge increase in sales.”

Shah cites the cosmetics brand elf, from California, in the United States. He says that, as a publicly traded company, elf’s share prices have remained “outside the norm” in recent times.

Over the past year, elf’s share price has soared by 203%, according to the website MarketWatch. And these high prices are the direct result of the company’s enormous sales growth.

“The company’s sales increased exponentially last year and this is significant, as they position themselves as truly affordable cosmetics,” explains Shah.

“And if you look at their marketing efforts, they all target the 10- to 12-year-old demographic.”

Promoting products to a younger demographic may simply be related to the overall growth seen in the industry, but Shah says the connection is there — and elf is just one example of the cosmetics and skincare phenomenon among kids ages 10 to 10. 12 years old as a whole.

Many companies in the beauty and skin care sector are targeting increasingly younger customers and achieving huge sales volumes, according to Shah.

Data from the Statista portal shows that the market for children’s and baby skin care products is expected to show an annual growth rate of around 7.71% until 2028, when it will reach a market volume of US$380 million (around R $1.87 billion) worldwide.

In the same year, the number of users of this type of product is expected to reach 160.7 million people.

Baby products

“The market is growing very quickly. There are many new brands launching [produtos] specifically for girls between 10 and 12 years old”, says Jessica DeFino, creator of the newsletter The Unpublishable (“The Unpublishable”, in free translation), dedicated to the behind-the-scenes of the beauty industry.

DeFino cites several cosmetics and skincare brands that have launched specific products, not just for 10- to 12-year-olds, but younger demographics, in recent years.

Parents of babies may have already heard of Yawn, an American company that offers makeup and skincare products to customers ages 3 and up.

Bubble, which calls itself the “new school skincare”, has been offering skin-texturing and acne-fighting products since 2020.

They are now sold in the US beauty store chain Ulta and in pharmacies in the US.

Gryt, launched in 2023, claims that its products are aimed at children and teenagers from the age of ten, but can even be used by children as young as eight.

“I’ve seen an explosion of products for children,” says DeFino. “I’m also seeing more and more girls using adult products before adolescence… From a commercial point of view, the marketing is there. These younger age groups are being actively targeted.”

And it’s not just specific cosmetics stores. American pharmacy chains, such as CVS and Walgreens, have undergone renovations in recent years to put beauty products in a prominent position.

These products include cosmetics actively promoted to children, employing TV shows and children’s books in their marketing strategies.

Many of these general merchandise pharmacies are where children have their first shopping experiences with their parents, long before they are old enough to visit specialty stores like Sephora on their own.

The marketing of cosmetics brands for children takes several forms, according to DeFino.

In addition to specifically creating products aimed at attracting younger consumers, she says that marketing aimed at this audience has been proliferating through social media.

This includes a growing number of tweens demonstrating how to use these products to their followers. They are “skinfluencers”, skin care influencers.

Post-pandemic legacy

All of this comes at a time when children are spending more and more time on social media after being cooped up during the pandemic.

These children are among the biggest consumers of certain social media platforms, according to Shah, who is the founding director of the Social Media Intelligence Lab at Georgia State University.

All this time spent on social media exposes these young users to influencers paid by brands to use and promote beauty and skincare products.

And increasingly sophisticated algorithms feed this exposure, presenting influencers and beauty recommendations to users, after a few searches on the topic.

Add in the fact that tweens and teens care about their appearance — and we have a “perfect storm.”

“Children care about their personal appearance,” says Shah. “They are very self-conscious about how their growing bodies will transform and their developing personal identity.”

“There is a lot of sensitivity in this regard and has been for decades. These two factors combined are what really determines sales in these younger demographic groups”, continues the professor.

But are Sephora and Ulta stores really being overrun by pre-teen shoppers?

The two brands declined to comment on the matter, but the market for products aimed at young people is expanding — and these products are sold in both stores.

Even if the data on the rise of beauty consumers doesn’t include the age of Drunk Elephant’s customers, Denish Shah has another very compelling argument about changing marketing in the cosmetics and skincare industry. And many parents will agree with him.

“My own daughter was influenced. She asked for these products as gifts and had never done so before.”

This text was originally published here. Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Worklife website.