A few weeks ago, I saw my two nephews. My mum keeps a big box of our old toys, and the three-year-old loves the kitchen set: he delights in plonking radioactive-looking broccoli florets on plates or, learning from trips to Starbucks with his mum, making me “mint teas” in empty paper cups. It brought back memories of my twin sister and I playing house — coddling our existentially staring Baby Annabells, cooking up imaginary banquets and sassily roleplaying with fake flip phones. Is there anything so harmless?
But recently, make-believe has had a facelift. Gen Alpha — aged around 13 and under — have grown up to the sound of pinging iPhones. The effects of omnipresent social media have yet to appear in their entirety, but recent studies have reported, aghast, that among other things young children now “swipe” books instead of turning the pages. What is less discussed is the fate of that narrow window between girlhood and womanhood, where imitation — of our mothers, sisters, TV idols — informs the adults we become.
Enter the tween skincare addicts: girls as young as 10 slathering excoriating retinoids on their baby faces, scanning beauty aisles for hyaluronic acid formulas, bookmarking videos of the best “dupes” of £300 La Mer moisturisers. These girls are copying women who are, in turn, trying to prevent the ravages of age. It’s a closed circuit with one clear beneficiary: skincare companies such as Drunk Elephant which, TikTok detectives speculate, uses bright packaging to deliberately entice the youngest potential customers.
So-called “Sephora kids” have become a new virtual bogeyman, with videos of throngs of tweens queuing up at the beauty department store raking in thousands of likes and indignant comments. Viewers complain of children leaving samples spilling over counters, dragging parents to tills to drop a week’s wages on It-products, or slapping on lotions with the exuberance of a rebellious daughter digging through her mum’s makeup bag. For this is exactly what it is: ancient bottles of Estée Lauder Double Wear and dusty Bobbi Brown blushes found during tip-toeing trips to your mum’s bedroom have simply been replaced with slick, silicon-free Bubble and Glossier cleansers name-checked in online beauty “hauls”. Tweens have always roleplayed as the adults they see — the difference, now, is that these are strangers online espousing the rites of a new purification cult.
In the glossed, plucked and pouty world of TikTok, anything and everything can be improved, filtered and fixed. A decade ago, when millennials began deploying filters and Facetune, photos of pub crawls and freshers weeks gave way to selfies with lolling dog tongues and colossal lashes. Gradually, women began to self-fashion to resemble these filters: they would paint on, or inject in, a Kardashian cheekbone, a Jolie lip or the Tipp-ex white teeth of a Love Islander.
But Gen Z has bucked the trend to embrace “wellness”, with its fixation on “natural” looks and lifestyles in such a way that medication, meditation and skincare have turned the scrutiny inwards. Balking at the artifice of noughties glamour, with its visible extensions, orange foundation and boob jobs, Gen Z has moved towards an extremely effortful effortlessness in the form of the minimalistic “clean girl aesthetic”. The clean girl sweeps her hair into a claw clip French twist. She has a clear complexion perfected with an arsenal of skincare solutions, and if she wears foundation it must be so light as to be virtually undetectable. She is always flushed, probably having just come in from a “hot girl walk” to fetch a matcha latte. And she can probably be found journalling, manifesting, setting relationship boundaries or drinking CBD-infused kombucha.
The look has been accused of being fatphobic, classist, ageist and racist. But what is less discussed is its focus on ritual: “clean girl” skincare regimes are not simply a lifestyle trend but a purification rite to distinguish apostles from the silicone-filled, lush-lashed “dirty girls” who are not, never, like us. The trend’s implicit snobbery attempts to rein in bodily mess and discomfort — after all, the overriding sensations of girlhood — and to erase any trace of effort. It completes the horrific logic of beauty: I am the standard, and look — I didn’t even have to try. With such an obsession with prevention, of ageing, ugliness and, above all, unwellness, did Gen Alpha ever stand a chance?
Millennial columnists have long lamented the “puriteen“: the Gen Z archetypes who swerve drink, drugs, sex and debate for wellness, regimen and homogenous “wokeness”. As a Gen Z, I think this characterisation is mostly exaggerated — a classic of the “in my day” genre. But online, within a few hours of liking the right videos, you could very quickly be led by algorithms to believe that not a single person under 25 has ever shagged, shouted or spewed. As a generation, we seem extremely put-together — and it is this facade that children and tweens are copying. Brace-faced girls lining up to spend their pocket money on premium skincare products are mimicking the performativity of their older sisters who, after long shifts “getting ready with me” on TikTok live, settle down to nights of bed-rotting, doom-scrolling and goblin-mode catatonia.
We Gen Zs know wellness is just another fantasy — but as long as influencers play pretend, tweens will pretend back. There is a danger that Gen Alpha — who are destined to grow up with exceptional internet-forged cynicism but are too young to have yet mastered this — will take my generation’s puritanical tendencies at face value, seeing them as essential and, dare I say it, cool parts of femininity. It is clear to anyone who watches a nine-year-old talk to camera about the lathering power of a cleanser that they are, quite simply, taking it all way too seriously.
And yet the awkward, gawky grossness of being an adolescent girl is incredibly important. I spent a memorable summer before starting secondary school hunching around in patchwork linen tunics with white, lace-trimmed leggings, looking like something out of an avant-garde retelling of Oliver Twist. If that seems impossible to visualise, all the better.
I didn’t get social media — specifically, Facebook — until I was 19; at the time I’d mumble something about it not “aligning with my principles” when in reality, I was self-conscious and self-aware enough to know that no digital footprint should exist of the painfully uncool strangeness of my girlhood. Although my lameness was probably exceptional, I am now so glad of this foresight: adolescence, a delicate and desperate thing, is made of private fantasies and bodily weirdness. When exposed to the disinfectant sunlight of social media, how can young girls expect to develop any sort of “authenticity” — which is, after all, social media’s holy grail? Might these children, with every squirt of their Bubble Bounce Back Balancing Toner Mist, be aligning themselves with visions of womanhood which sterilise reality and originality?
What happens when the specific oddness of this time is combined with the purification rituals of women in their twenties and thirties? Jonathan Haidt, in his latest book, has written of the displacement of “play-based childhood” with a “phone-based” version by the early 2010s; one result of this is that today’s teens, already beset by mental health problems and doomed to an extended adolescence by our dire economy, are expecting to emerge perfect from prepubescence as miniature 30-year-olds.
So yes, little girls playing dress-up with luxury skincare products, while expensive and pointless, is not the end of the world. But the compulsion to do chemical peels when you haven’t even started your period might kill that tender, excruciating unknowingness of being somewhere in between little and big, an age at which only the bedroom mirror should bear witness to the way girls love and lament their changing faces.
Let us remember the Guardian’s trust is reputedly founded on Slavery money- is this true or is it a myth ? .
Who cares? The days when a self-selected and hypocritical elite could tell the rest of us what to think and expect us to doff our flat caps and say ‘aye aye yer honner’ will soon be gone for ever.
Democracy is coming.
Shutting both the titles would make the world a happier place!
The hypocrisy and double dealing of the Guardian’s business decisions should hardly come as a surprise.
Guardian Media Group, when it sold its 50% stake in Auto Trader to Apax Partners in 2008, used a tax-exempt shell company in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying corporation tax. GMG realised over £300 million in profit on that sale – yet paid not a sou in Corporation tax. This was all perfectly legal.
Over the years Guardian Media Group has invested hundreds of millions in offshore hedge funds. Keeping it under the radar and beyond the grasp of HMRC. Again, all perfectly legal.
And yet, the high-minded journalists of the Guardian love nothing more than thundering their disapproval of large multinationals – Starbucks, Apple, Vodafone etc – and the unnamed “super-rich” not “paying their fair share.”
Guardian columnists (especially Nick Cohen before his excommunication) regularly get their knickers in a bunch over such tax avoidance – though oddly never train their guns on their employer, the sanctimonious Scott Trust. Why do multinationals warrant such opprobrium whilst GMG escape any criticism? What, pray, is the difference? They too are not breaking laws, merely using every legal loophole they can find to their best advantage.
After the Panama Papers story brought a lot of this to light there were many (individuals and companies) who leapt to their own defence, suggesting that even their most opaque business dealings were legal – according to the letter of the law – yet that simply wasn’t good enough for Guardian journalists who sniffily pointed out that such obfuscation was immaterial. They might be legal by the letter of the law, but not by the spirit.
Hey ho, merely another chapter in the ongoing ‘do as we say, not as we do’ saga that is the Guardian’s entire modus operandi.
As I noted the other day, the Guardian is by far the most destructive publication in the UK. Its circulation is paltry, yet its influence is pervasive and pernicious. The Guardian has an “on-air” wing in the shape of the BBC. It is also required reading for the legions of metropolitan fauxialists who manage practically every quango and institution in the country. Not to mention that it is the go-to news source for the vast majority of the teaching profession.
So although circulation figures are ever dwindling, it informs the worldview of a great many people who influence the agenda and shape the country’s -and our children’s – future. The Britain hating, race-baiting, class-envy, history-revisionist, climate-catastrophising, woke, pc leftist clap-trap that we all complain about, is in large part down to the Guardian dripping its poison every day, thirstily imbibed by readers who influence and skew the national discourse.
The G’s ongoing narrative is wholly at odds with reality – they have a dystopian worldview and narrative predicated on catastrophism – it seems almost as though they are willing such a future into existence, Presumably so they can console themselves in a sanctimonious circle-jerk of “I told you so”.
The Guardian proudly trumpets “Comment is free… but facts are sacred”. Yet facts are so routinely ignored in favour of their preferred narrative that I wonder how the Editors still put out CP Scott’s dictum every day with a straight face.
And of course Comment is decidedly not Free on the Graunaid’s web-site. See how long a comment in suppport of, say, foxhunting, lasts before it is deleted.
Anyone who “donates” even a brass razoo to The Grauniad needs their head well examined. I agree with all your opinions and the facts are beyond dispute.
Ah the morality of the left . Sacrificing humans and families for reward.
This Observer/Guardian/Scott Trust kerfuffle has many of the elements of an episode of Midsomer. So many characters, plot and subplots. So many unknowns.
This article is inaccurate insofar as the Guardian barely has any reputation left to damage.
True enough.
It’s amusing to read lefty journalists that think that ink-stained wretchdom is a sacred trust. Maybe you chaps should transform the Guardian / Observer into a Church of Activism. Or something.
I remember back in ‘93 when the Observer effectively became the Sunday Grauniad. The late great Paul Johnson wrote at the time, “What do you Guard? For whom do you Observe?”.
Yes. I used to be a faithful reader of The Observer until it became clear, following The Guardian‘s takeover, that the paper’s ethos had been ruined by ‘progressive’ prejudice. It can never be the same as it was, but new ownership might change it for the better. We’ll have to wait and see.
“Moreover, The Guardian and the Trust are sitting on a £1.3 billion cash mountain, with millions added every year from donations by readers of its website and figures such as Bill Gates.”
Now that’s a story I’d like to read: where does the Trust/Guardian get most of its money? Apart from Gates, are any other billionaires footing the bill and why?
Ironically given its editorial enthusiasm for taxing the rest of us, the Trust was originally set up to avoid inheritance tax and has since been re-constituted multiple times to be more tax efficient since.
It’s money comes from owning print titles and investing in new media. It is very cash rich largely because it sold off assets over the last decade or so, including the Autotrader title for £600m.
The Autotrader was it’s saving at the time, the Guardian had 50% and flogged it off. It has no paywall but gets subs from it’s wokie readers and can always tap up the Lord Alli set for bigger amounts than the £15 a year most people would offer.
The Guardian doesn’t like talking about the Autotrader reading class these days, it considers them part of Hillary’s deplorable class of people.
Basically now it’s a glorified blog site wittering rather than reporting, with a shrunken news site and even more shrunken print version.
Having its stories circulated on Twitter/X (which they still are despite it flouncing off officially) is a two-edged sword as it acts as much as a don’t bother paying, as a come-on.
The Gardian goes cap in hand to its readers every day, telling them how poor it is and how much it needs their donations to keep going.
I was thinking of throwing my hat into the ring with an offer to buy both The Gaurdian and The Observer. Moreover, I would pledge to retain all existing staff and columnists. I would, however, make one tiny change by adding the strapline The Home Of Satire below the banner. None of the staff would get the joke, but then they don’t realise how funny they really are. There’s irony in that, as well as satire.
Try: off-guardian.org
The rush is probably the Guardian is still losing money and a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush,
Business is volatile and they are smart to take the opportunity before them.
The Guardian newspaper itself may lose money but the Scott Trust has more than enough to cover it. Guardian Media Group also includes various other profitable media businesses and a new media venture capital fund.
The simple answer is that the Trust has had a strategy of selling-off legacy media holdings for the last 15 years, including things like regional print media and local radio. Selling the Observer title is just the next step. Their online brand is already consolidated under the Guardian banner, so it makes little sense to maintain a separate Sunday operation.
The Observer seems to have made £3.4 million last year. Not very much, but still enough to make it odd that the Scott Trust might be preparing to pay the lossmaking Tortoise Media to take it away.
Still, it is clear from yesterday’s edition that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are just super, so on what grounds might anyone object to the title’s acquisition by the decidedly non-lossmaking BlackRock?