Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by tweens inside a Sephora
It’s like a scene out of a dystopian film—filthy testers are strewn along aisles and tweens are hungrily taking over a mecca for beauty lovers: Sephora. Gen Alpha, unsupervised prepubescents who have porcelain-like, baby skin, go in packs and leave everything in disarray. I hate to sound like a Millennial auntie—the not-so-cool type you only see during the holidays out of obligation—but it’s happening, it’s real. The tween takeover is here.
One Sephora employee vents on Reddit, sharing how these “terribly behaved children” go into stores and “continually pump out product and then just leave it.” They also—get this—draw on displays with lipstick. A girl allegedly yells at a store manager for not having Benefit’s Cookie Powder Highlighter in stock. The said employee is tired of seeing “spoiled-ass 12-year-olds wearing [Lululemon] be absolute assholes to everyone around them.” Oof.
@cassandrabankson I thought it was just a rumor #drunkelephant #sephora #tweenskincare ♬ dont blame me sped up – r & m <3 ⸆⸉
Drunk Elephant is at the center of the controversy, with many “entitled barely-teens,” as one Reddit user puts it, swarming to Sephora to cop their bestselling products, which let’s face it, they don’t need and can’t afford on their own. Maybe it has something to do with the brand’s bright, audacious neon packaging. We can also infer that it has a lot to do with the brand’s “smoothies,” where they market specific products to be mixed together for better results.
Tiffany Masterson, founder of Drunk Elephant, shared her thoughts on the phenomenon with AdAge. “I don’t think we need to do another post on it. There’s only one answer, and that is we have products for all skin, and not every product in our line is appropriate for every person. Acids and retinols are certainly not appropriate for prepubescent skin. We’re gonna keep repeating that as much as we need to repeat it,” she notes.
@dermarkologist Dermatologist rates Drunk Elephant Products for kids with a simple Yes or No #drunkelephant #sephorakids ♬ baddie background – Dersim
A reader quips, “I can’t believe people are blaming [Drunk Elephant] when it’s parents of these 9-year-olds being irresponsible, when I was 9 I had about 2 lip balms to my name and that was it.”
Though there are exaggerated (?) stories out there of, not-so-mildly put, bratty tweens, I’d like to think I was once a hormonal, trend-obsessed prepubescent. The type who loved flavored Lip Smackers and Maybelline Great Lash Mascara in that iconic pink-and-green packaging; the kind who only dreamt of coveting MAC Lipstick in Ruby Woo and NARS Velvet Matte Lipstick in Dragon Girl. In short, we all desperately wanted anything that would make us feel pretty or to conceal our insecurities. Oh, and let’s not forget that peer pressure was, is and will always be a thing.
It’s easy to look at it from the perspective of a Millennial auntie who frowns upon such “unbecoming” behavior, but let’s face it, they’re kids who just don’t know any better. Now if they could just figure out how to CLAY-the fuck-GO.
Art Macky Arquilla
