Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 6:15AM Tween girls' use of make-up is up. What's more, moms apparently think this is just fine.
As a one-time parent of young children, I wasn't ready for this.
In the current issue of THE WEEK, the findings of the NPD Group are reported that show in a national sample of females regarding use of make-up, tween girls' use of beauty products is rising, whereas adjacent age groups show a decline.
What NPD found may surprise you--it did me. While the use of beauty aids for young women 13-24 shows a decline compared to a 2007 benchmark study, NPD--a leading provider of reliable and comprehensive consumer and retail information for a wide range of industries--found that tween girls [8-12 years old] reported significant increases in the regular use of mascara, lipstick, and eye-liner.
The tween trends upward are pretty substantial.
Nearly 20 percent of girls 8 to 12 regularly wear mascara; this is twice the number reported three years ago. Use of lipstick for tweens was also up 50%, with 15% reporting regular use, compared to just 10% previously. Regular eye-liner use almost doubled over the previous findings, going from 9% to 15%; in addition, the average number of beauty products used for tweens increased for the same period to 4.5 from the earlier number of 4.3.
These increases are especially dramatic, since the regular use of these same products is down for female teens 13-17 and young adult women 18-24.
It's moms who make this all happen.
What explains this change? It is apparent that the mothers of tweens are a part of the phenomenon, says NPD's vice president and global analyst, Karen Grant: "They're [i.e., tween girls] not sneaking this stuff. They're doing the shopping with their moms." With mothers and family reported to have more influence than television or peer tweens, these girls "look to their parents and siblings to see what they are using to help decide what to buy and use. As tween girls using beauty aids has now become a family affair, it is our opportunity and responsibility to ensure that these girls, and their parents, are educated on the role of beauty in the most responsible way."
Speaking of educating about the role of beauty.
Some time ago, I posted a revealing time-lapse video--sponsored by the Dove cosmetics people--on the artificiality and unattainability of beauty as portrayed by Madison Avenue advertising [see Dove "gets" marketing to women]. That little girls are preoccupied--must less encouraged by their mothers--to be concerned by such formidable cultural demands seems, simply put, sad.
It's hard to say if these findings represent a sufficiently negative societal trend for young females to be apprehensive about. It just seems a shame that even if they are not, little girls should not need to be fretting about what beauty aids to use--or used at all. Tween girls are at a time in their lives when attention to just about anything else would be more advisable--and more sane--instead of focusing on eye-liner, mascara, and lip-stick. There'll be plenty of time--if they must--in the future, just not in the tween years!
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Reader Comments (1)
From personal parenting experience, a tween that's not "in" with the latest trends in (name-brand) clothing and cosmetics is a social outcast. And this is in a very middle-class'ish school system in SE Mass. While our tweens obsess over lipstick, mascara, Abercrombie and Fitch, and the latest output from Stephenie Meyer, there are hundreds of thousands in China and India (and elsewhere) that are focused on moving up in life through acquiring the best education they can. Guess what will happen in a decade or two when these kids hit the workforce?