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There is an epidemic of young girls entering beauty stores, either alone or with a guardian so uninvolved that they might as well not be there at all, and wreaking havoc on the whole store.

Because these kids were raised on the internet and had parks and public places taken away from them, they are taking to destroying beauty stores such as Sephora to get out of the house.

They destroy the testers, mix products together, treat the staff horribly and spend hundreds of their parents’ dollars on products they should not be using. Nationwide, people are taking to social media to complain about and criticize these children and their parents.

Instead of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, the children of today are being raised on social media. The COVID-19 pandemic definitely contributed to this, but generational cycles did too.

Many children and preteens are being raised by millennial parents, who were mostly raised by boomers. Boomer parents were raised in what is known as “tough love,” so that is what their children know.

Many millennials grew up fending for themselves, so now that they have children of their own, they are not sure how to go about raising them properly because they were never exposed to other parenting styles. They provided an iPad to their children for entertainment, which eventually grew to a codependency on the tablet to help them raise their children and keep them calm in moments that would otherwise lead to meltdowns.

Spaces to exist other than school and home, also known as third spaces, are incredibly important in a person’s development.

With society becoming increasingly hostile towards youth, specifically pre teens and teenagers, parks and public places are becoming less and less safe for kids to exist in. There are not many places to go besides malls. On principle, kids need places to just be kids. Sephora is not the place. However, with third spaces being erased and malls becoming less and less popular, kids are running out of places to be kids in.

Many children have turned to the internet, which is further engraining the ideals of social media on their impressionable minds, perpetuating the vicious cycle of forcing harmful beauty standards onto children.

Because these kids were raised on the internet, they have been exposed to the idea that aging is bad. Now that they are tall enough to see over a bathroom counter and into a mirror, they can see that their skin does not look like what the filtered super-model skin is made to look like.

Since they have been spoon-fed the idea that, “the younger you look, the better you are” for as long as they can remember, they have taken to cosmetic stores to fix the perceived problem of looking their age.

The expensive skincare brand Drunk Elephant has become quite popular among these children, largely due to TikTok. Drunk Elephant includes anti-aging ingredients like retinol.

Retinol is used to encourage skin cell production, exfoliate skin and produce collagen. Retinol products are not recommended for people under the age of 25.

By using these products at age 12, children have essentially reversed the effects of the product and turned it into a pro-aging ingredient.

Along with retinol, many children are purchasing chemical exfoliants used to even out skin tone and fade dark spots and blemishes. When these exfoliants are used improperly, they can cause chemical burns on the face, which can lead to permanent scarring.

Many people blame the children, but kids owning these products is the fault of the parents. Children who cannot work do not have the money for hundreds of dollars of skincare.

Children who are part of the generation who statistically are unlikely to be able to read an analog clock do not have the comprehension skills to read and understand the instructions and warnings on a bottle.

The parents of these children can teach them how to explore and enjoy spaces such as Sephora in a respectful and mature way.

On social media, there is a narrative being pushed that self-care and wellness inherently means expensive and intensive skincare routines. There is no room for variability.

These kids that want to be cool are loading their skin down with products that do nothing but harm them. They are searching to look young for as long as they possibly can, yet in the process harming not just their skin, but also their self-esteem and confidence.

“Sephora kids” are annoying. There is no denying that they are behaving incorrectly and destroying stores. That being said, we cannot place the blame entirely on the kids.

This is a learned mindset. We have to put some thought into where they learned it and why they are behaving this way in the first place.

Alia Hester is a Nederland High School tenth grade student.