I didn’t see the aurora, but I tried. At 10 or 11pm, I looked out of my bedroom window and squinted, and saw only darkness, but even so I found some lovely pleasure in it. The knowledge that something was happening in the sky, that all along my road people were standing in their gardens and angling their cameras towards the same big tree, and afterwards scrolling to see what they’d caught, sharing them on the street WhatsApp at midnight with pride. The next day, news sites reported on the northern lights as if they were young women getting out of cars – they “stunned”, “radiant”. I liked the way we were all united briefly in our lazy pursuit of beauty.
Elsewhere in my life, the search for beauty feels more treacherous. My daughter, 10 years old, went to a birthday party last week where she told me every other gift her little friend opened was a bottle of moisturiser. It should not have been a surprise, perhaps, having read about the rise of the “baby and child skincare market”, expected to reach $380m in market volume by 2028, but still, I found myself oddly troubled. I am fully and intimately aware of the lure of skincare, both the appeal of a daily routine (whether three or 15 steps, whether retinol or oil) and the sense it can give us of control in a time of chaos, but alongside that the capitalist creep, the repackaging as self-care, skincare as a kind of psychic protection, is something I know young girls might find particularly appealing. What troubled me the most in this instance, though, was the realisation that while my daughter and her friends are fully versed in the language of “body positivity”, understanding, for example, that diversity is a good thing and that fat bodies aren’t unhealthy, no such movement has really broken through about skin. In fact, as beauty journalist Jessica DeFino stresses, diet culture has been replaced by skincare culture.
This week, New York Magazine ran a piece about teenage boys’ skincare routines. For instance, 15-year-old Rex ends the day by massaging a cleanser with moisturising water-lily extract into his cheeks, before applying Rile Face Hydrator, a lightweight emollient, or CeraVe’s heavier Night Cream, finishing with a slick of Vaseline on his lips. The market-research firm Mintel recently reported that nearly 70% of gen Z men use skincare products, often new specialised brands with “playful names: Rile, Insanely Clean, Dr Squatch”. This rise coincides with an increase in young people being diagnosed with acne worldwide. According to a new study published in the British Journal of Dermatology, rates in the UK are among the highest globally.
But that’s not to say more young people have acne today – what it means is, more are seeking treatment for it, and purchasing creams they’ve seen on TikTok. Is it working? Dazed Beauty quotes James Hamblin, author of Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less, who argues that a major contributing factor to acne is, in fact, the overuse of products. Real skincare, he says, would be investing in public health – in parks, rather than serums. “As we change our worlds, we change our bodies,” he writes. “The old duality between environmental health and human health is obsolete.”
I don’t know. If my daughter and her tween friends were getting excited about makeup, rather than skincare, I think I’d find it less disturbing. The fantasy, the dressing up, the transformation, the glitter, the rinsing it all off at night-time and starting again in the morning. Instead, I fear their attraction to perfection. There’s never been more pressure to have perfect skin, and by perfect, oddly, I mean skin like theirs. Skin that hasn’t seen more than 10 summers, that appears poreless and wrinkle-free, dewy, a forehead that reflects the classroom light. And if your skin can’t be perfect, then it must at least be good – this is perhaps one of the last spaces in which appearance can still be merrily summarised as good or bad, bad being flawed, meaning pigmented, or spotty, or dry, or loose, and bad implying as well, at best poor health, at worst immorality.
These are the body-image lessons dripping from the internet through tweens’ relationships with skincare, at the same time that they’re learning about algebra, puberty, the ex-boyfriends of Taylor Swift. To embrace skincare is to grow up, is to embrace vigilance, shame and anxiety, is to start seeing yourself in not just a mirror but on a screen, is to be part of something larger. Maybe buying the moisturiser at 10 years old is not about beauty so much as survival.
The thing about the aurora borealis last week, of course, was that while we all looked up into the sky to witness this magic, this rare moment when milky streaks of purple and green appeared behind our neighbours’ rooftops, for most of us it was only really visible when mediated through our phones. The cameras saw what our eyes could not and, like youth or beauty, it was fleeting and shimmered, and became more real as it was shared. There was community in this, but a sense of detachment, too, as if perhaps, even though we were constantly looking up, constantly trying to reach for beauty, there must be far, far more we were missing.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on X @EvaWiseman
