Should I give makeup to a 3-year-old daughter?
Amid the avalanche of pink gifts and gifts to "feel like princesses", influencers Or actresses, makeup for 3-year-old girls shines brightly. "Fun and family-friendly" makeup for before school, according to retailers. So the answer to the question that heads this article is YeahMany mothers and fathers will be giving a gift this holiday season. kit of makeup to their three-year-old daughters... perhaps without realizing that, with that seemingly innocent gift, they are also giving them a critical view of their own bodies from ages when they should be able to live freely, without pressure, without aesthetic self-censorship and without the feeling that they must "improve" themselves to be good enough.
What seems more like an episode of Black Mirror A toy campaign is based on a supposedly aesthetic product meant to be fun and encourage shared routines between mothers and daughters. They promote learning by imitation. Just like when we gave our daughter or son a toy kitchen so they could put some chickpeas or grains of rice in the little pot and stir them just like their mother or father did in the kitchen. But here, they're not imitating tasks, but rather ideals of beauty; they're not playing pretend cooking, they're playing at correcting each other.
Pour into the internet window and you'll find brightly colored creams and paints for face and eyes, pink hydrogel masks, manicure sets, kits Nail polish and other tools inside adorable unicorn makeup bags. A whole world of seemingly cute and harmless beauty that, in reality, subtly introduces our 3-year-old girls to a culture of body policing, constant comparison, and self-imposed aesthetic demands. A culture that steals real, spontaneous, and creative playtime and replaces it with the silent learning of a devastating idea: "It's not enough to just be; you have to be pretty."
The trend ofskincare It's encroaching on the world of children. The problem isn't just promoting habits with no medical basis—no three-year-old needs a ten-step facial routine—but normalizing the belief that a child's body and skin must be corrected and optimized. And reinforcing the traditional female role of always being beautiful in order to succeed in life and love. This increases the risk of cosmeticorexia, defined by psychology as a compulsive preoccupation with physical appearance and the constant need to modify it with cosmetic products. And meanwhile, social media and the industry are rubbing their hands together: a new market, that of children, is opening up to them, immense and emotionally manipulable.
Body image psychology, with authors such as Jean M. Twenge (2017) and Nancy Etcoff (1999), has long warned that early exposure to aesthetic ideals increases body dissatisfaction, hypersexualization, and the risk of emotional problems. Furthermore, younger generations of girls, highly exposed to social media and aesthetic pressures, exhibit more symptoms of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem. There is no doubt that beauty culture shapes self-perception, and that commercial messages internalized very early on affect identity and psychological well-being.
But the marketing tsunami doesn't stop. Canadian actress Shay Mitchell, known for her starring role in the series Pretty Little Liars (Pretty Little LiarsShe recently created Rini, her new cosmetics brand aimed at children, with beauty products for girls as young as three. It emulates the Korean 9-step beauty routine trend. The name is no misleading: Rini means "child" in Korean.
Parents are easily swayed because the promotion is massive and disguised as tenderness and care. However, without realizing it, they are helping to build more insecure personalities, dependent on external—especially male—consumerist, and vulnerable. When expectations about how "one should be" become too far removed from reality, they increase the risk of distress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, even in pre-adolescence.
Perhaps, deep down, this says more about us than about them, about the adults we are rather than the children we raise: it speaks to our difficulty in setting boundaries, our unhealthy relationship with aesthetics, the perpetuation of patriarchal stereotypes like "beautiful woman - intelligent man," and our vulnerability to rampant consumerism. And the key question is: do we want our daughters to learn to play... or to learn to please?