You may have noticed a recent change at your local Sephora: The customers are getting shorter  while the lines are getting longer. The prestige retailer, once a rarefied space for beauty connoisseurs with money to splurge, is increasingly attracting younger clientele — specifically, 10-year-old girls. 

The media has dubbed this phenomenon the “Sephora kids” epidemic, igniting a firestorm of conversation about Gen Alpha and its appetite for luxury beauty products, like Drunk Elephant’s $68 moisturizer  and Sol de Janeiro’s $24 body spray. The phenomenon has elicited online ire and mockery as Sephora employees share anecdotes of poorly behaved kids wreaking havoc at stores, and Millennials reflect on their own childhood beauty routines comprised of comparatively inexpensive drugstore products. 

The notion that kids are purchasing pricey face creams and cosmetics, many of which contain anti-aging ingredients, has struck a nerve among older generations concerned that Gen Alpha is growing up too fast. Their concerns are valid — 10-year-olds using wrinkle-smoothing cream is certainly dystopian (not to mention the harsh ingredients in these products, like retinol and exfoliating acids, can damage their skin). But up-aging — children acting older, younger —  is not unique to so-called Sephora kids. The term “Kids Getting Older Younger” (or KGOY), used to describe the marketing of adult products to children in an attempt to hook them early, began gaining steam in the early 2000s. 

But what we’re seeing with Sephora kids is KGOY with an important twist: Tweens are using adult beauty products as both signifiers of adulthood and tools to delay visible signs of maturity, like wrinkles and sunspots. Sephora kids want to be older and younger at once. And those quickest to criticize Sephora kids have so far been hesitant to acknowledge the most important factor here: Adults have created a culture that encourages children, especially young girls, to act and present as older. 

Of course, kids mirroring adult behavior is also nothing new. Parental figures are role models whose habits, good and bad, rub off on their children. But the “monkey see, monkey do” relationship between children and their elders is intensified in an age when kids have unlimited, unmonitored access to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. 

Sophia Muñoz, 19, began posting beauty content with her 10-year-old sister, Sylvia, to TikTok after seeing a deluge of posts about Sephora kids. In one video Sylvia reviews her stash of beauty products (all purchasable at Sephora), including Drunk Elephant’s B-Hydra Intensive Hydration Serum ($49) , Tatcha’s Dewy Skin Cream ($72), and Kosas’ Pump and Juicy Collagen Spray-On Serum ($48). 

“I don’t try as many new things as my sister,” Sophia tells Highsnobiety. “She likes the trendy skincare she sees in GRWMs [Get Ready With Me videos] and hauls on TikTok.” While Sophia began shopping at Sephora around 12 or 13, Sylvia began frequenting the retailer at 8. “I definitely think TikTok is accelerating Gen Alpha’s perspectives and interests,” Sophia says. “But at the same time, I put on my mom’s heels and applied her lotion when I was my sister's age. Up-aging has always been a thing, but now it’s viewable to a broader audience.” 

It’s also ripe for clicks and engagement — and ultimately, profit. Sophie’s aforementioned video with Sylvia has been viewed over 1.3 million times, making it one of her best-performing posts. Beauty influencers are getting younger, swaying their tween peers’ buying behavior and in the process, generating revenue for brands. Already, we’re seeing labels popular among Sephora kids encourage the profitable phenomenon: In December, Drunk Elephant posted an Instagram graphic responding to speculation over whether “kids and tweens” can use its products. “Yes! Many of our products are designed for all skin, including kids and tweens,” the caption reads. 

Social media is also contributing to the decline of tween-specific brick-and-mortar spaces: think Justice, Limited Too, and Claire’s, mall stores that once doubled as IRL hangout spots for countless ‘90s kids. But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which dealt a blow to retail and forced tweens further online, these kid-friendly spaces lost their cachet. “Tweens are highly addicted to [social media], so there is no need for third spaces,” says stylist and content creator Alyssa Mosley. “The ultimate third space has become their iPhones.” 

Recent studies show that on average, girls are starting puberty earlier than ever before. It stands to reason that the “down-aging” of puberty is contributing to the up-aging of young girls — as their bodies begin to develop, they might feel pressure to participate in behaviors, like skincare and makeup shopping, that are associated with the trappings of mature girlhood. Once girls reach a certain age (and continue to get older), they’re expected to maintain an aesthetic baseline in regards to their appearance. By purchasing expensive mascaras and anti-aging creams, Sephora kids — specifically, Sephora girls — are simply mimicking the beauty regimens and appearance-related anxieties modeled by their elders. Still, the conversation surrounding what’s “age-appropriate” for tween girls has spawned commentary disparaging and shaming them for wanting to participate in the beauty space at all. 

“This is not something that’s happening in a vacuum,” says Kate Phelps, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of a forthcoming research volume on digital girlhood. “When you walk through a toy aisle, the majority of the toys being sold to young girls are covered in makeup… We think of an interest in makeup and beauty as something vapid and shallow, but that’s only because we’ve associated it with femininity.” 

The Sephora kids craze is a multifaceted phenomenon that reflects how society both conditions and engages with tween girlhood. “A girl is both a product of and a producer of trend, culture, and society,” Dr. Phelps says. “As caretakers of tween girls, we need to do some reflection before we vilify their behavior and mock it. Beauty is important to how girls move through the world, especially in a hypervisible, consumptive society. Girls place value on it, but we’ve also laid bare those foundations for them.”