There are actually two very different products on the market under the same general kid’s makeup label, and most arguments parents have over it go sideways because nobody separates the two.
There’s kids’ makeup, those glitter palettes and peel-off nail polish and strawberry lip gloss that get passed around at birthday parties and Christmas stockings, but then there is the Sephora thing, where ten and eleven year olds are buying up adult skin-care products after watching someone else use them on TikTok. The latter is what one should actually be worried about.
The market got big, and it got younger
Household spending tells you how far this has gone: Nielsen data records households with kids under 12 spending a few billion dollars a year on skin care and make-up products, and a US survey found 70 percent of children already using some form of children’s make-up or body product, mainly face paint.
Statista put the UK cosmetics market at $3.17bn in revenue for 2024, and most of the make-up kids now ask for by name is the same stuff adults buy, which tells you the marketing gave up separating the audiences a while ago.
Where kids are actually finding it
Why the popularity of kid’s makeup products is seeing an upward trend? Not the toy aisle, mostly. It’s get-ready-with-me videos, some of them made by influencers who are tweens themselves, and it’s the character collabs, where a brand ties a themed collection to whatever movie is big that year, so the whole category ends up feeling closer to merch than to something adults do.
Boys are in this too, by the way. Interest in grooming products among young boys has been climbing for a period of time, it just gets less coverage.
The Sephora side is what dermatologists are concerned about
Kids have taken to retinol, exfoliating acids, and vitamin C, and a dermatology review of the trend concluded none of it was scientifically tested in a pediatric population. Possible side effects include redness, irritation, increased UV sensitivity, and dermatitis. There have been reports to dermatologists of tweens developing rashes, allergic responses, and skin burns from products not designed for their skin type.
A ten-year-old doesn’t have anything to treat with an anti-aging serum, and if you’re a tween with real acne, you should be talking to a physician because the formulations for acne aren’t even the same.
Regulators have begun to get involved. Sephora, for example, settled with the Connecticut attorney general’s office by agreeing to place warnings on product pages, and to train employees to flag products that could be highly dangerous to minors. When a retailer that size adds guardrails on its own site, you can assume the complaints behind it were real.
Play makeup needs a label check too
Because the general assumption was, if it’s for children, it must’ve been tested before it hit the shelf. Cosmetics do not require FDA approval to go to market. Lead, mercury, and asbestos have been found in products aimed at children. An example of this is an FDA study of ten face paints, all of which had lead.
“Non-toxic makeup products and accessories” and “hypoallergenic” aren’t regulated claims. There’s no requirement of evidence from manufacturers, and you need to vet them yourself. It shouldn’t take too long, if you know what you’re looking for:
- Check FDA’s list of approved color additives. Color additives are the one part of cosmetics the agency does have to sign off on.
- Do not use powders with talc.
- Patch test on the forearm the day before, and watch for any redness.
- Toss out anything that smells off.
- Everything comes off before bed.
Some go so far as to DIY kid-safe polishes and supplies from the ground up, water-based enamel and peel-off polish are really great, and starting there beats raiding a parent’s adult set of supplies, though the label check applies to those too.
Culture had a foot in this well before TikTok
Festival makeup, wedding prep, dance recitals, Halloween, a grandmother doing a granddaughter’s face before a family function, are all older than these brands, and usually come with supervision and meaning already built in. It’s honestly the healthiest form the whole thing takes.
If it’s in your house, teach the routine
Banning it outright mostly relocates it to a friend’s bathroom. Better to supervise it.
Makeup application is as simple as start with clean skin, use less makeup than you think, and take it all off before bedtime. Teach those three and the play version pretty much writes itself.
The frame is more important than the products. Drawing on a face the way you would on paper is a craft, and kids treat it that way when the adults around them do. To treat it as fixing something wrong with a child’s face is a different thing entirely, and family physicians have been blunt that social media already pushes kids to measure themselves against idealized, impossible images. Kids follow the frame the adults set. Keep it play, keep it supervised, keep it off at bedtime.