Scrolling mindlessly for hours on end, one of the largest social media apps, TikTok, creates conflict for the younger generation. Recently flooding the internet, many people have been complaining about how children (specifically young girls) between the ages of 8-12 have been exposed to older content that influences them to wear mature  makeup,  skincare, and clothing. 

Aida Ravelo (’24) expresses the influence that social media has over children and how it is growing insecurities about how they look or what they have. Social media  is an engine of constantly changing trends that are difficult to keep up with, and this can become  stress inducing to younger kids as they do not hold their own incomes or access to follow these trends, Ravelo emphasized. 

“I feel like standards for women have never really changed, they have always been the same: are you pretty enough, are you skinny enough, are you curvy enough. I feel like at this point we have rebranded it into ‘are you cinnamon girl?’, ‘are you a bunny girl?’, ‘do you have deer eyes?’, ‘are you keeping your hair shiny?’, ‘do you have a skincare routine?’, ‘do you have a hair routine?’, it’s just the same thing in a different font and I feel like now because a lot of kids are growing up really young with having iPads and all of these standards at a really young age you’re doing the same thing for their skincare which at this point in their lives they shouldn’t have to worry about and is actually really damaging to their skin at such a young age,” Raevelo said.   

As a mother herself, Mrs. Brooke Nichols (FAC) , also comments on the issue and how she feels about this conflict. 

“I think that there are good things that they can be exposed to like to understand skincare because now we know much better like the damage that the sun can do and the importance of sunscreen and taking care of your skin so that I think is good. Where it goes overboard is just that there is so much out there. I have seen the addiction to TikTok and I have just been scrolling through all of this stuff and you are bombarded on social media with things to buy, so that’s the part that I think is not good. It’s not helping young people understand that you just can’t buy everything under the sun,” Mrs. Nichols said. 

Many teenagers, like Maddison Sutton (’25), feel strongly about this  as it is causing a rude attitude in younger girls when shopping at beauty stores like Sephora and Ulta.

“I keep seeing these videos of young 10 year olds rampaging through these stores. They see something on TikTok used by a 20 year old woman and will instantly feel like they need to buy it to keep up with the trend. What they don’t realize is that almost every product shown on TikTok is an advertisement and a marketing scam,” Sutton said. 

   Bigger creators on Instagram and Tiktok are starting to create videos addressing this issue and some are advocating for Sephora to create an age requirement for shoppers. In the next few months these standards for younger girls may change or escalate into something more.