Brittany Ouyang does not do much to perfect her 3-year-old daughter’s skin, because it happens to be flawless already. Her routine, if you can call it that, includes water, sunscreen and the occasional moisturizer.
So Ms. Ouyang was baffled when her sister sent her an Instagram post last week about a new skin care line that was advertised for children ages 3 and up. She visited the website for the brand, which is called Rini and was co-founded by the actress Shay Mitchell, and saw pictures of poreless children who looked to be 10 years and younger beaming from behind jellylike face masks enriched with vitamin B12.
“That is ludicrous,” Ms. Ouyang, 36, who works in tech and lives near San Francisco, texted her sister. She joined a chorus of people criticizing the company with a post on TikTok: “What kind of capitalist hellscape are we living in?”
Nearly two years after a flurry of press about tweens swarming the aisles of beauty stores like Sephora, skin care lines for preteens and even younger children have become a robust product category — and a battlefield for parents and critics.
Households with children ages 7 to 12 spent close to $2.5 billion on skin care last year, up from $1.8 billion in 2022, according to data from NielsenIQ, a consumer research firm. A growing list of companies offer skin products for preteens that are packaged in containers that look like candy dispensers and advertised with soothing assurances about gentle, dermatologist-approved ingredients.
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