What are ‘Sephora Ten Year Olds’ and is this trend really dangerous?

I’ve been writing for Fall River Reporter and New Bedford Guide for a few months now and almost every night at the dinner table, my children will ask me what I wrote about each day or what stories I’m working on. My youngest daughter, who is a freshman in high school, had a request.

“Write about the Sephora 10-year-olds.”

There’s a wild trend taking place in America right now and it may just be the first example of what Generation Alpha, or Gen Alpha, is all about. The “Sephora 10 Year Olds” are young girls who are visiting Sephora stores across the country and according to some, destroying makeup and skin care displays in the beauty realtor locations.

Employees and customers have taken to TikTok to share their videos of filthy makeup displays, opened boxes of product and testers mixed with other product testers causing a mess for employees to clean. Driven by the thousands of “Get Ready With Me (GRWM)” videos online where girls share their skin care and makeup routines with followers, these pre-teens are hitting the stores and testing out all the products available to them, leaving a path of destruction along the way. The Drunk Elephant brand of skin care is one of the most popular, with different items often being combined to make a “skin care smoothie” that children are trying out right in stores.

Sephora employees complain that some children are unattended by an adult and left to wreak havoc in the store, opening packages causing thousands of dollars of product damage. Other employees say that due to increased demand, the stores are often sold out of the popular products, causing the child shoppers to get upset.

And while some of the Sephora activity could just be labeled as a childhood trend, others are more concerned with the youngest generations skin care routines, some of which include Retinol and other anti-aging products. Dermatologists worry that children using these products are actually harming their skin, all in the name of a TikTok trend.

Dermatologist Dr. Brooke Jeffy warns about children using these products and the damage they can do:

“When the skin barrier is damaged by constant irritation like this, it gets dry,” Jeffy says. “It’s more prone to infection, more prone to getting rashes and more prone to breakouts.”

Check out some of the TikTok videos below:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8tApkTt/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8tDRhu9/