OPINION: Prime Time - Little girls are buying the lie that women 'expire'

I was a child in the early 2000s when the eating disorder culture was in full swing and How to look 10 years Younger aired on weeknights.

While I was too young to fully understand what I saw on television and in magazines at the time, I like most other young women today grew up having internalised much of its messaging. 

There is nothing wrong with teaching children the importance of sunscreen, healthy eating and good personal care to protect them from illness and to lead healthy lifestyles as they grow up.

However, there is so much wrong with giving a seven year old a brand affiliate link for retinol and encouraging her to care about wrinkles she will not even see forming for another three decades.

Young girls are seeing online how viciously women have been treated for their looks and how they age.

They may not understand it but they are still joining in because subconsciously they too feel forced to conform to unhealthy and often unattainable beauty standards. 

How have we still not figured out how to protect future generations from going through what we went through and yet the beauty industry has taken several audacious leaps forward with marketing anti-ageing to primary school children?

This issue has reached a point where it could not possibly be any more skin deep.

Thursday night's episode of RTÉ's Prime Time provided a key insight into the extent to which children can articulate why they are participating in the latest skincare trends and show how far their consumption of skincare products has gone.

What stood out was how often in their answers, the children sounded as though they were repeating things that they had heard or they were looking to an adult for prompts.

It is heartbreaking to see something become such an intimate part of a child's life and they clearly are unsure as to why they do it other than because they see it and feel that anti-ageing is a concern for them too.

"It's absolutely shocking."

The 'Sephora kids' trend, as it is dubbed by social media users, sees children as young as seven adopting complex skincare routines reports, often including anti-ageing products reports @ItsCeriDoyle.

WATCH: https://t.co/pusf7TF1d9@rtenews | #rtept

— RTÉ Prime Time (@RTE_PrimeTime) August 30, 2024

Dr Colman Noctor and Dr Rosemary Coleman, who featured on the program, provided key input to this discourse as they made clear their very real concerns about the long term impact anti-ageing skincare routines have on the minds and skin of such young children.

Dr Rosemary Coleman, a dermatologist who featured on last night's program, expressed concern that young girls were at risk of becoming, as she put it "self-obsessed".

A key point to remember in all of this is that while she is right, girls are becoming 'self-obsessed' through engaging in this trend, it is not in an arrogant way and they do not deserve a hard time for it.

These girls are being set up to place their entire self-worth on how others perceive the way that they look.

It is exhausting trying not to let a single hair be out of place and requires an awful lot of time spent looking at yourself and critiquing yourself trying to reach a standard that no one can attain.

In the 2010s it used to be the case that when little girls were seen playing with lipstick at makeup stands that it was seen as some kind of failing on society that they were interested in makeup at such a young age. 

Now, we have reached the skincare market and I am having to awkwardly wriggle my way through a group of girls who have yet to make their First Holy Communion to reach the retinol on the lower middle shelf.

I was twenty-four years old when I began using a low grade retinol and had already been wearing sunscreen daily for two years prior to adding this to my routine.

Now at twenty-seven, I still have yet to reach the first peak of ageing, not something I should pay any mind to but that has not stopped me from thoroughly examining my face every day to see if my expression lines are still visible when my face is relaxed. 

I look virtually no different to how I did in my early twenties and it is the same for the majority of women I know and yet I used to believe that I would be old and dramatically different looking by the time I hit my late twenties.

The notion that women expire and we must spend every day of our lives being reminded of that starting from childhood is a sinister one and as Psychoanalytical Psychotherapist Dr Colman Noctor put it, "childhood is shrinking."

Life is too short in many ways but it is also too long to be worrying about concoctions for unavoidable fine lines and wrinkles.

I cannot help but think of my own niece who at seven years old, her whole world revolves around school, her friends, Roadblocks!, unicorns, her dog and feeding her chickens though I am still unclear as to whether it is all in that exact order.

I fail to understand retinol or niacinamides' placement in that equation.

If you are not ageing it means you are dead and we must find a way to reach a point where we fully recognise and embrace that the first option is a privilege.