The Tiktokification of Skincare: The Growth of the Child Skincare Market
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Sound familiar? If you’re a woman, this rhetoric is all too common. Believe it or not, each of those sentences were quotes from different TikToks. Since the days of Youtube, I remember being drowned in skincare content, from GRWM -an acronym for Get Ready With Me- videos, to product recommendations to acne journeys. Beauty influencers like Zoella, Jaclyn Hill and Tanya Burr were a pivotal moment in my exposure to the world of beauty and skincare. It was a new age of product marketing. No longer did brands have to rely solely on their own marketing team to spread the word on their brands or spend thousands on celebrity ads, they could just send a few free products to a handful of youtubers and watch them market the brand for them. The viewers ate it up.
And then came Tiktok. What Youtube started, Tiktok continued. Except now, it was easier to become an influencer and more common for brands to use them like their puppets.
The consequences of this evolution has contributed to a vicious cycle of insecurities. Vulnerable teenagers are being preyed on by brands and influencers who now have the ability to target their insecurities with the holy promise of various ‘cures’. Cures for acne, big pores, tired skin…the list is never-ending; when the list does come to an end, brands invent new insecurities for people to be concerned about. Thanks to TikTok and the influencers that come with it, spreading the message about these insecurities and ‘cures’ is as easy as filming a minute long video. The consumers can’t win. The rebranding of ‘beauty’ and what it entails will never end and short form content like TikTok has only helped to speed up this endless cycle of beauty standards.
Youtubers such as Zoella and Tanya Burr were a few of the influencers from my childhood. They typically gave off ‘girl next door’ energy to start with. They were your cool big sister, your knowledgeable auntie, your clued up best friend. You didn’t have to rely on millionaire celebrities to recommend you beauty products anymore, you had Youtubers. With weekly if not daily videos including hauls, makeup tutorials and of course, skincare routines, you really felt like you knew them. So when they’d let you in on their beauty secrets, you’d listen. When you followed their affiliate links to buy the products they recommended, you were just supporting their channel of course!
Now when Tiktok entered the room, skincare marketing took a step up.
Skin care brand and TikTok account, @everedenbrand is targeted primarily at children. It’s feed is covered in TikToks of kids as young as six talking us through their skincare routines and following skincare trends. One video follows a Everden ambassador interviewing kids in the street and when two kids tell her they don’t have a skincare routine and don’t know the sephora kids tiktok trend, she persists to give them some free products she has in a basket. Another video, using an Ariana Grande song as the sound, has a kid-sized doll nodding her head with the caption, “Maturing is realizing there is “cool girl” skincare that’s actually made for your age”.
In doing some research on the brand itself and looking at the website, it seems the brand tries hard to use child-friendly ingredients. However, as always with skincare brands, there are a few ingredients that they themselves advertise as ‘low safety’. This is just a risk when advertising to children - there's no easy fool proof way to ensure complete safety. Tiktok proves that there is a market for child skin care, so it's inevitable that brands will take advantage of that.
If you think this is out of the ordinary, this is actually becoming the norm. According to this article from the BBC , “Data from Statista shows that the baby and child skincare market is expected to experience an annual growth rate of about 7.71% until in 2028, it reaches $380m (£299m) in market volume worldwide…This isn’t just about young kids trying their mums’ creams, but an industry expanding to reach a broader age spread of consumers.” Brands are targeting children, and they are all too aware that the easiest and most efficient way to do this is on TikTok. Tiktok is now a free-for- all, flooded with creators and influencers who can post endless brand sponsored content without much moderation.
So, is there anything actually being done about this? Here are the TikTok guidelines including their section on protecting teens online. It covers the obvious; graphic content, bullying, harassment, stranger danger etc. but I can’t see anywhere that mentions brand marketing. Where are the moderators who decide if a brand should be able to market to children? Should adult skincare with products like retinol be allowed to directly market to children? Where are the adults at? This piece by The Guardian shows how stressful the job of a moderator is now - they have their hands full with bigger issues. The societal decline of teenage girls' mental health will have to wait.
So, we know young teens are getting marketed to. If a 12 year old girl is told by one of her favourite influencers that her glowing, glassy skin is all thanks to a collection of expensive skincare products, of course the young girl is going to try and mimic her routine. But why does this matter? Well, on top of the 'you're not good enough' rhetoric being introduced to children before they even hit secondary school, they are also receiving this unsolicited advice from people who do not necessarily know what they're talking about. This case study shows young teens and adults are increasingly relying on non-professionals to tell them what to do with their skin, with the percentage of advice from properly qualified dermatologists being far lower. However, this doesn’t stop your average influencer from spouting out recommendations and unproven facts about skincare in order to make a buck. Influencers -with the help of brands are placing themselves on a pedestal of faux knowledge. Influencers are now claiming to be professionals.
This leads to a large group of people getting recommended skincare that isn’t right for their skin. Children are being recommended anti-ageing creams and retinol based products that not only don’t do anything to help their skin, but also can worsen it. Insecurities are being planted in young girls' heads for issues they don’t realistically need to be worrying about. “Dr Anjali Mahto, a consultant dermatologist and the founder of the Self London clinic, says she has “definitely noticed an increase in the number of teens coming into my clinic who are concerned about anti-ageing”. Just a few weeks ago, she adds, she met with a 14-year-old client “who was concerned about crow’s feet”. Mahto reckons this premature obsession with wrinkles “has absolutely been driven by social media, particularly TikTok, where teens are exposed to influencers showing their in-depth, often unnecessary skincare routine”.
Whilst kids have always had the presence of ‘influencers' in their life to look up to and to tell them what skin care to buy, tech and social media advancements in recent years mean kids have no escape from the endless bombardment of Tiktok’s beginning with, ‘Guys…I’m going to let you in on my skincare secret’. Tiktok's creation and popularity has brought with it a flurry of influencers, all desperate to get an audience. Statistics sayGen z are more likely to see affiliate marketing so it's not shocking to see Dermatologists and Doctors are being pushed aside when it comes to skincare advice. With the over-consumption of information that the internet provides, it's hard to tell what information is or isn't true. This leads to them looking to their favourite influencers to lead them down the right path, no qualifications needed. There is a lack of moderation on tiktok and that leads to ‘blanket recommendations’ - young people are being recommended products that aren't needed or good for their skin. When these products don't work, we'll that's okay because there's another £50 cream that might just do the job. And guys, for a short time only, if you go through my affiliate link, you can get a 10% discount on this life-saving cream! You won’t regret it…and I’ll earn 5% of every purchase made, but you don’t need to know that.
Written by Shan Victoria
Shannon's current role is as Head Runner at a sound studio, but really she is an aspiring writer. She has a love for all things nature, travel and film. Her current hobbies involve jigsaw puzzles, trying to make vases from clay and visiting hobbycraft to buy things she'll never use.