How worried should we be about the Drunk Elephant tweens? (2024)

Indeed, this winter, the uproar over kids’ skin care usage has spread across social media and the internet in stages. First came the bewilderment at the inclusion of teeny bottles with scientific-sounding names on so many kids’ Christmas lists, and the viral reactions to kid influencers’ “get ready with me” videos. Then there was the aforementioned concerned backlash, followed by the annoyed backlash — the latter spurred by viral videos of makeup counters trashed with tester products and forum threads about kids fighting with their parents when their Sephora shopping baskets rang up in the hundreds of dollars.

Until recently, multistep skin care routines were understood to be an adult’s game. Products like Pond’s cream moisturizers have, after all, been around since before World War II to “help women keep their skin looking radiant.” “Anti-aging” ingredients like retinol and Vitamins C and E, which experts say help the skin retain its smooth texture and even tone, gained popularity in the 1990s, largely among older women. In the 2010s, women (and some men) in their 20s made the pursuit of a selfie-ready complexion a trademark millennial obsession, with many Americans discovering the Korean multistep method that both preps the skin for makeup and protects the skin from it.

Now armed with neon-packaged (and sometimes pricey) creams, masks and peels, kids have inundated the skin care market. On the one hand, it’s perfectly common to see preteens want to pamper themselves in grown-up ways; it’s even healthy for them to want to take care of their skin. But on the other, the phenomenon could be evidence of adults infecting them with our unhealthy fear of aging.

So is this something we should panic about, or not?

And today, just as in prior generations, girls learn self-pampering behaviors from both adult women and other girls. Twelve-year-old Olivia Sauvage crafts her skin care routine from TikTok videos where influencers walk viewers through the “clean girl aesthetic,” which encourages a minimalist approach to beauty and fashion. Every morning, Sauvage washes her skin with a cleanser. Then she then applies a mix of a Glow Recipe bronze skin tint and Drunk Elephant moisturizer on her face before topping things off with a niacinamide serum from the Ordinary and sunscreen.

“I don’t do skin care to necessarily make [my skin] better,” she said, after perusing a Sephora in Northern Virginia with her mom. “It’s more of a self-care thing.”

Videos like the ones Sauvage watches frequently garner hundreds of thousands to millions of views and are sometimes sponsored by skin care brands.

Heather Rogers, a Seattle-based dermatologist, is particularly worried about how kids are overexposed to elaborate routines on TikTok, which she says has shifted the zeitgeist to overindulgence. “If someone with a lot of followers is doing their seven-step skin care regimen, people want to emulate that and then they want to talk about it and videotape themselves doing it.”

“And that’s the plight,” Rogers continued: making sure people aren’t turning a healthy habit into a harmful one.

“I try not to get her too much stuff,” said Jamie Matheny, 38, also shopping at a Northern Virginia Sephora, about her 10-year-old daughter, whose routine is stripped down to gentle products, including a Byoma cleanser, Bubble moisturizer and a Byoma gel sunscreen. This was just enough for them to do their skin care routines together. Sometimes they’ll put on face masks and kick back. “It’s a bonding experience.”

Moreover: Kids developing healthy skin care habits early can be a positive development. Dermatologists now recommend that nearly every type of skin be cleansed, moisturized, protected from the sun and nourished with gentle ingredients like hyaluronic acid — all of which, they say, is perfectly kid-friendly, and can even alleviate some of the symptoms of hormonal acne as kids enter puberty.

Common guidance about young people’s skin has come a long way from the harsh anti-acne products of two or three decades ago. Remember when locker rooms and your friends’ bathrooms always had the bracing scent of St. Ives apricot scrub and Stridex pads?

Today, “It’s all about protecting their skin barrier — keeping it working well. And if they’re concerned about age-related change, the sunscreen is the most important thing they can do at this age,” said Brooke Jeffy, an Arizona-based dermatologist who primarily treats kids and teens.

Now, some fear that the youngest consumers have been instilled with the same anxiety. Jeffy frequently posts TikToks and Instagram Reels in which she calls out kids who film themselves using overly damaging and expensive products meant for wrinkle and dark spot prevention.

Some popular products, like The Ordinary AHA 30% + BHA 2% peeling solution, which promises to remedy skin dullness, uneven tone and textural irregularities, are “a no for any person, child or adult, unless someone is experienced with dealing with acids” found in the product, Jeffy said. “This is a really strong product … you can get chemical burns if it’s left on the skin too long. And I don’t really say I trust most kids to take it off when they’re supposed to. The same goes for adults.” The peel and other harsh products, Jeffy and Rogers said, can leave skin overly sensitive and prone to accelerated aging. (The Ordinary did not respond to requests for comment.)

Jeffy, who works about three days a week, says she usually sees five kids a day with acne made worse by using inappropriate products. And Rogers, who primarily works with moms, says she frequently gets frantic messages from her patients about their kids who have developed irritations. Her advice? “Stop everything. Get a bland moisturizer and take away their phone.”

Other popular products among kids, like the Drunk Elephant Protini polypeptide cream, may be benign but are still a waste of money, Jeffy said. The cream, which can improve lines, wrinkles and signs of sun damage for $68, according to the Drunk Elephant website, “is a great hydrator, which isn’t a bad thing for tweens and teens,” Jeffy said. But there are other ways to hydrate the skin, and “they don’t need peptides,” the primary ingredient.

“If their skin isn’t damaged,” and most kids’ skin isn’t, “then what is it correcting?” Rogers added. “Nothing.”

Drunk Elephant agrees. On their website, they note that the cream, which they say is supposed to “boost healthy collagen to strengthen skin,” is not significantly useful for young people who are “making collagen in abundance.” A company spokesperson said in an emailed statement that while anyone can use its products, the brand does not recommend that younger users apply ones that contain “high concentrations of active ingredients” addressed to target specific skin concerns.

Still, tweens and teens may be drawn to brands like Drunk Elephant because of their colorful neon packaging, said Monica Arnaudo, the chief merchandising officer at the retailer Ulta Beauty. The younger generation “is driven by their passion for self-care and self expression,” she said, adding that they “embrace products that allow them to celebrate their imperfections, like pimple patches that come in fun shapes and designs.” (Sephora did not respond to a request for comment.)

The great irony of all this is that beauty-minded, aging-phobic adults want skin with the luminous, dewy clarity and smooth texture that the average eight- to 11-year-old has naturally. As one Twitter user put it, “My daughter is 12. She wanted some skin care thing with collagen in it and I said, ‘No honey, that’s for old people like Mom. We use it to look like you.’”

All that said: Jeffy said there’s no right age to start using advanced skin care. Kids struggling with acne, for example, have valid reasons to start using retinol early. “Salicylic acid is a great product to treat mild acne. But it is still potentially irritating,” especially for younger skin, she continued. So a dermatologist has to tailor a solution for a patient.

Grade-school kids with clear complexions, in other words, likely don’t need the same heavy-duty treatments adults do to maintain glowy, baby-soft, ultrasmooth skin.

But given the world they live in, perhaps they could be forgiven for already wanting to keep it forever.