According to “Cosmeticorexia: How girls are falling down a skincare rabbit hole” on the BBC, an eight-year-old posting skincare routines on TikTok, earning her family £50,000 a year by thirteen. The story ran as a profile of a child influencer. The more useful frame is structural: what happens to a generation that encounters the attention economy before it encounters adolescence? Europe is beginning to ask that question — and the answers are not reassuring.
The Skincare Symptom and What It Points To
Children cosplaying adult routines is nothing new. What is new is the fixation: tweenagers are no longer asking for bikes and board games but toners, serums, cleansers and moisturisers, practising multi-step skincare routines for performative “get ready with me” videos. The baby and child skincare market is expected to reach $380 million in market volume by 2028.
The phenomenon of very young children adopting adult skincare regimens — reported across the BBC, the FT, and multiple European consumer protection bodies — is real and measurable. A Northwestern Medicine study found girls aged 7 to 18 use an average of six products per routine, some using more than a dozen, with only 26% of daytime regimens including sunscreen. Prior evidence shows that developing contact dermatitis in childhood can limit the kinds of cosmetics a person can use for life.
But the skincare story is a surface-level expression of a deeper structural shift. “We have entered an era where girlhood is being sold back to us in aesthetic skincare bottles and excessive self-care regimes,” says Ellen Atlanta, author of Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Harms Women. “It is no longer enough for children to be children; they must now be beautiful and photogenic too.” The industry did not manufacture this anxiety unprompted. The algorithm surfaced it, amplified it, and monetised it.
Attention Before Development
The deeper problem is sequencing. Children have always been influenced by peers, media, and advertising. What is different now is the intensity, the personalisation, and the age at which it begins. A child with a TikTok account at age eight is not encountering a passive media environment. They are entering a system specifically engineered to capture and hold attention — one that is significantly better at that task than any teacher, parent, or peer.
Consumer protection campaigners, medical professionals and beauty industry reformers across Europe are calling for stricter rules on skincare companies’ sales and marketing tactics, warning that youthful skincare obsessions are causing physical and emotional harm. In the UK, Save Face has called for legislation to restrict the sale of skincare products containing strong active ingredients such as retinols and acids to under-18s.
That regulatory conversation is real and necessary. But it addresses the output — the product in the child’s hand — not the system that put it there. The attention economy does not need skincare to damage children’s development. It does it through the basic mechanics of algorithmic social comparison, sleep displacement, and identity formation shaped by content rather than experience.
Three Things That Change When the Algorithm Arrives First
The research points to three specific developmental disruptions. First, sleep. NHS guidance and the European Sleep Research Society have both documented the correlation between adolescent screen use and shortened, disrupted sleep — with evening TikTok and Instagram use directly competing with the sleep that supports cognitive development, emotional regulation, and memory consolidation.
Second, attention architecture. Short-form video — designed to deliver novelty in three-second windows — is a significantly more stimulating environment than a classroom, a book, or an unstructured afternoon. Children who spend formative hours in that environment are training their attention systems in conditions that do not transfer to slower, deeper forms of learning and engagement. France has already moved to restrict smartphones in schools partly on these grounds.
Third, identity formation. Adolescence is the developmental period during which identity is built — through experimentation, peer feedback, failure, and revision. That process traditionally happens in local, human-scale social environments. Social media replaces it with a global comparison system in which the reference group is not classmates but influencers, and the feedback mechanism is not friendship but metrics. The real reason teens and tweens choose to spend their pocket money on toners over toys is the pervasive influence of social media — this is where they find out about rose quartz face rollers, expensive setting sprays, and the difference between “glass skin” and “glazed donut skin.” The aesthetic is the entry point. The identity formation is the actual territory.
Europe’s Regulatory Response Is Forming — Slowly
The EU’s approach to these questions is developing across several tracks simultaneously. The Digital Services Act requires platforms to provide risk assessments for minors and restricts certain forms of targeted advertising to children. The AI Act includes provisions relevant to recommender systems. Several member states — France most prominently, but also Ireland and the Netherlands — have moved ahead of the EU baseline with restrictions on smartphone use in schools and tighter rules on influencer marketing to minors.
As explored in “The Quiet Expansion of Algorithmic Life,” the systems that shape adult choice are not fundamentally different from the ones shaping children — they are just operating on users with fewer cognitive defences and more developmental vulnerability. Europe has been faster than most jurisdictions to regulate the adult version. The child version is where the political will is still catching up to the evidence.
The skincare routines are a readable symptom — visible, photographable, shareable, and therefore useful for illustrating the problem. But the question worth asking is not why children want £20 serums. It is what it means for a generation to encounter an optimisation system before they have developed the self to optimise.
Key Sources
- UnHerd, “Cosmeticorexia is a symptom of social media replacing play”: https://unherd.com/newsroom/cosmeticorexia-is-a-symptom-of-social-media-replacing-play/
- Save Face / FT, “A Toxic Environment for Children: Inside the Beauty Cosmeticorexia Battle”: https://www.saveface.co.uk/en/blog/post/a-toxic-environment-for-children-inside-the-beauty-cosmeticorexia-battle
- Northwestern Medicine / Healthline, “TikTok beauty routines may cause skin allergies and irritation”: https://www.healthline.com/health-news/tiktok-beauty-routines-may-cause-skin-allergies-irritation
- Springer / Dermatology and Therapy, “Cosmeticorexia: definition, sociocultural drivers, and clinical implications”: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13555-026-01685-2
- The Independent / AOL, “The rise of the skincare tweens”: https://www.aol.com/news/rise-skincare-tweens-serums-eye-061642390.html
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