In 2023, the “clean girl aesthetic” has become the newest trend, with skincare and makeup being the main things that achieve the look. A brand called Drunk Elephant has become super popular because of this trend for their expensive skin care in cute packaging. One thing that has made this brand so popular is influencers making skin care smoothies: a mix of bronzing drops, toners, and moisturizer. However, when this got popular young girls would come into Sephora to make these smoothies on the testers and make a mess of it and not clean it up. The result was that other people could not try out these products and the employees had to clean them all up.
A worker saw what she guessed to be an 11-year-old girl pumping moisturizer out of a testing bottle and leaving it on the counter. “She didn’t even try the product,” a worker recalls in the article, stating that, “she just made a mess for no reason…And I was like, Why are there so many kids here?”
In addition, Drunk Elephants products are made for older people with aging skin, so they contain ingredients like retinol. Retinol is made to reduce the look of wrinkles, large pores, and acne. However, these young, 11-year-old girls don’t know about the side effects of dry skin, itching, burning, redness, and sunburn that they are exposing themselves to. Since this product is not for their skin, there are more side effects than benefits. When Sephora employees point this out to these tween girls they will normally become defensive and mean.
In addition to Drunk Elephants there are other brands that got popular such as Sol De Janeiro, Summer Fridays, etc. These products sell out super fast because of their popularity on social media but when employees tell these girls that these products are not in stock they will create a scene, yell at their moms saying that it was all they wanted, and even yell at the employees.
Many employees and other adults are wondering why these tween girls are using this type of skincare. Why are they causing such messes and scenes? But most importantly, why aren’t their parents doing anything about it?
