Picture this: It’s a Saturday morning after a long week of school. You decide to treat yourself, so you and a few friends are gonna go to Sephora for a little shopping trip. You get prepared, pick everyone up, and go on your way. You finally make it up to Sephora, and you’re happy – you’re excited – nothing could ruin this moment. Then, you and your friends walk into the store, and what you see terrifies you: millions of sticky nine-year-old girls rummaging through the products, testing everything they see, yelling at their mothers, and holding carts that are filled to the brim. What could all these nine-year-olds be doing at Sephora, you ask yourself. But unfortunately, that is a question many have been asking, but none have been able to answer. It wasn’t always like this. Why have nine-year-olds decided to invade beauty stores across the nation? In this article, that’s what we will try to answer, with an emphasis on “try.” 

Now, I know that this article could easily be filled with quotes from news sites talking about this phenomenon, but there’s no need for that because I have a first-hand example of this treachery…my cousin.  My cousin Peyton is nine years old. Before she turned nine, she was a somewhat typical little girl. She used to have an obsession with L.O.L. dolls, she rode bikes, she sang, and she danced; she was a pretty cookie-cutter kid. But her interests drastically changed when she turned nine. Suddenly, when we’d go to Florida to visit her, she’d talk about things like Drunk Elephant and bronzer and how she wanted an iPhone for Christmas. This baffled me. What happened to Peyton, I used to know but Peyton is not the only little girl who has adopted this lifestyle. 

To learn more about this epidemic, I asked Emmy Daniel, a Dover High School student and makeup/skincare specialist, what her thoughts were. She said, “In my experience, as an avid Sephora shopper, I have noticed and witnessed numerous children scamper into Sephora with unruly attitudes. If I acted like these children, it would be a wrap on my life, education, and future as we know it. Now, Sephora is practically my second home, and I have become emotionally attached to the wonders it brings. As of late, ten-year-old girls have been obsessed with Sephora. Let me be clear, it’s not sparkly lipgloss or fun eyeshadow, it’s expensive skincare! These children, who are practically fetuses, have been buying wrinkle cream and serums costing over fifty dollars. Someone tell these children to go to Claire’s because not even my own grandma buys wrinkle cream. Everyone is aware of the brand that basically brainwashed these children, Drunk Elephant. I’ve seen destruction and chaos emerge from the Drunk Elephant section in Sephora. Product is all over the shelves, and containers are broken. I have witnessed kids open new packages, use them, and put them back. These ten-year-old girls plead with their parents for retinol and concealer. I have seen a girl, no older than nine, plead to her mom for foundation. Rare Beauty, for one, is a brand that has a chokehold on these young girls. These ten-year-olds rush into Sephora as if Selena Gomez herself entered the building. My biggest question is where are they getting this money? I have a job and can’t even afford half of what these children buy. The parents have no control and are being lectured around by a fourth-grader. This epidemic needs to end now because these kids are missing out on a childhood. Sephora needs to be cherished and protected. Live, laugh, Sephora.” With that, Emmy just annihilated every Drunk Elephant ten-year-old. 

A common thought is that little girls’ obsession with makeup stores has happened because of social media, especially TikTok. I mean, think about it: if a nine-year-old girl’s home page is flooded with beauty content, why wouldn’t she want to go out and raid Sephora? There could be the possibility that the TikTok algorithm is pushing this kind of content out to little girls because they see that it is working. The more beauty videos the girls watch, the more money TikTok makes as well as the more money beauty companies make. It’s a win-win for both. Going back to Peyton, I think that there is a correlation between her social media use and when she started wearing makeup. Within the past year, she began to watch YouTube shorts because she’s not allowed to have TikTok. I saw a change in her behavior once she began watching shorts. She would quote them all the time, and she’d often tell me about some crazy video she watched that was obviously fake. She’s just too young to understand, but anyway, it was around the time she began watching shorts that she became enthralled with makeup. The worst part is that, her little sister Charlotte, who is four, has been introduced to makeup through shorts and wears it every day now. What happened to playing with toys? Instead, my four-year-old cousin cakes her face every morning, and that sentence doesn’t even sound real. I do have to mention that Peyton’s iPad got thrown away because she was being naughty, so she hasn’t watched shorts recently, but the damage has still been done. 

Due to the actions these girls have taken, me and a few girls from the cross-country team went up to Canton. While up there, we decided it would be a great opportunity to go to these stores and see for ourselves if there really are nine-year-olds everywhere. Within the first millisecond of stepping foot into the store, I saw one. She was carrying a cart filled to the top with all sorts of products. What seemed to be her Mom and Dad followed her closely as she led the way to the next aisle. My whole body went numb. Then we saw another, this time she looked to be even younger than the other one. She was trying on products, touching brushes, unorganized shelves, all while we watched in fear. “Tell me this isn’t true, ” mumbled my friend Lyela. As we walked throughout the store, we kept seeing more and more of them. It was as if they were spawning in. But then, we noticed something that made us hurl. The testable makeup products were completely and utterly destroyed. Now I’m not talking broken, I mean that somebody opened the can of moisturizer, pulled as much as they could out and smeared it all over the lid, and then squirted some concealer on it for the cherry on top. It was nasty, and I know that it was a nine-year-old’s doing. 

To sum things up, nine-year-old girls need to stop invading beauty stores. They are nine, and they should be playing with toys and making cringe YouTube videos, not acting like a twenty-year-old. Again, I don’t know why this epidemic has swept the nation recently, but it needs to stop. I want my little cousin Peyton to go back to being a kid, not an adult.