If you've walked past a Sephora recently, you've probably seen it: a cluster of ten and eleven year olds crowded around the testers, comparing serums like they're trading cards. If you haven't seen it in person, you've almost certainly seen it on TikTok. The hashtag #sephorakids has racked up hundreds of millions of views, and it started with a fairly simple observation — a shopper filming herself asking, half-joking, why so many kids were suddenly buying up half the store.
It's not really a joke anymore. What started as a funny internet moment has turned into something dermatologists, pediatricians, and now regulators are taking seriously. Connecticut's Attorney General opened an investigation into how Sephora markets anti-aging products to minors. Italy's competition authority is doing something similar with Sephora, Benefit, and LVMH, specifically looking at whether brands used young influencers to sell adult skincare to children as young as ten. That's not a fringe concern — it's an active legal case in two countries.
So if you're a parent who's suddenly fielding requests for retinol serums from your fourth grader, you're not imagining things, and you're not alone.
What's actually driving this
A lot of it comes down to "Get Ready With Me" videos — GRWM content, in the shorthand kids use. Tweens film elaborate ten-step routines, narrating each product the way a beauty influencer would, and other kids watch, copy, and want the exact same shelf of bottles. One widely cited study looked at 100 of these kids' skincare videos on TikTok and found the average routine involved six products costing around $168. The most product-heavy videos in the group exposed kids to as many as 21 active ingredients in a single routine.
That number is worth sitting with for a second. Twenty-one active ingredients, on a child's face, recommended by other children.
The products themselves are usually the same ones adults use for wrinkles, dullness, and sun damage — retinol, vitamin C serums, glycolic and salicylic acid exfoliants. None of that was formulated with an eight-year-old's skin in mind, and dermatologists are increasingly seeing the fallout: redness, peeling, contact dermatitis, and heightened sun sensitivity in kids who were never dealing with a skin problem to begin with. One dermatologist quoted in recent coverage put it bluntly — using anti-aging skincare on a child doesn't produce anti-aging results, it just produces irritation and sometimes permanent damage to a skin barrier that hadn't finished developing yet.
There's a newer term floating around dermatology circles for the broader pattern: cosmeticorexia, meaning a fixation on having "flawless" skin. Researchers in Italy have floated the idea that it deserves to be studied as its own clinical concern, separate from body image issues more generally. Whether or not that becomes an official diagnosis, the underlying worry is one most parents will recognize instantly: kids chasing a standard of perfection that was never designed for them, using products that can genuinely hurt them in the process.
What kids' skin actually needs (and it isn't much)
Here's the part that tends to get lost in all of this: children's skin is not a smaller, younger version of adult skin that just needs gentler versions of the same products. It's structurally different. It's thinner, it hasn't fully developed its protective barrier, and — this is the part dermatologists keep repeating — it's already about as good as skin gets. Kids aren't dealing with sun damage, collagen loss, or fine lines, because they haven't lived long enough to develop any of those things. There's nothing to correct.
That doesn't mean skincare has no place in a kid's routine. It just means the routine should be doing a completely different job: protecting healthy skin, not fixing problems that don't exist yet.
Broadly, here's how it breaks down by age:
Ages 3 to 8 — Water and a very mild, fragrance-free cleanser is genuinely enough for most kids this age. If they're playing outside, a moisturizer and daily mineral sunscreen matter far more than anything marketed as "glow" or "brightening."
Ages 9 to 12 — This is usually when interest in skincare starts creeping in, often because of hormonal changes or social influence from school and social media. A simple cleanse-moisturize-protect routine still covers almost everyone in this range. If breakouts start, a gentle, low-strength option (like a mild salicylic acid wash used sparingly) is reasonable, but it's worth involving a pediatrician or dermatologist before adding anything stronger.
Teens — This is where things like acne treatment genuinely become relevant, since teenage skin is dealing with real hormonal shifts. Even here, though, the advice from dermatologists is to start minimal and add one product at a time, rather than adopting a ten-step routine wholesale from a TikTok video.
A simple routine that actually works
If you're building (or resetting) a routine with your child, this is close to what most pediatric dermatologists recommend, and it's the same three steps regardless of age:
- Cleanse — A gentle, fragrance-free cleanser, once or twice a day. No exfoliating beads, no "deep clean" claims. The goal is just to remove dirt and sweat without stripping the skin.
- Moisturize — A simple, fragrance-free moisturizer, applied while skin is still a little damp. Kids with naturally dry or eczema-prone skin may need something slightly richer; most don't need anything elaborate.
- Protect — A mineral (zinc oxide or titanium dioxide) sunscreen every morning, reapplied after swimming or heavy outdoor play. This is genuinely the single most useful skincare habit you can build in a child, since sun protection habits formed young tend to stick for life.
That's it. No serums, no exfoliating acids, no "step 6." If your child wants to feel like they're part of the routine-building trend without any of the risk, let them pick out a fun-scented (but still gentle) product or a nice-looking bottle — the ritual matters to kids more than the ingredient list does.
Ingredients worth steering clear of
A few categories are worth actively avoiding in anything marketed toward kids, unless a dermatologist has specifically recommended it for a diagnosed condition:
- Retinol and other vitamin A derivatives
- Alpha and beta hydroxy acids (glycolic, lactic, salicylic) used as leave-on treatments
- High-concentration vitamin C serums
- Heavily fragranced products, which are more likely to trigger irritation on developing skin
- Chemical sunscreens, where mineral options are generally the gentler, better-studied choice for kids
If a product's marketing leans on words like "anti-aging," "wrinkle," or "firming," it's not made for a child's skin — full stop, regardless of how the packaging looks.
Having the conversation without the shame
The instinct a lot of parents have is to shut the interest down entirely, and that's understandable given everything above. But dermatologists who work with kids tend to recommend a different approach: redirect rather than reject. Skincare can still be a fun, confidence-building ritual — it just needs to be reframed around health rather than correcting "flaws" that don't exist.
That might mean explaining, in plain language, what sunscreen actually does and why it's the one product worth being genuinely excited about. It might mean reading ingredient labels together so kids start to understand why "more products" isn't the same as "better skin." And it might mean gently pointing out that the influencers filming ten-step routines are usually being paid to use those products — which tends to land better with kids than a flat "no."
The goal isn't to make kids afraid of skincare. It's to give them a routine that actually matches what their skin needs at their age, so that by the time actives and treatments are genuinely useful, they already understand the basics instead of starting from a TikTok trend.