Article by BR Tabatha
I found something on YouTube the other day that initially I felt was really cute. Super cute even. I had an ‘oh what a sweetie’ moment. But then I started to feel a bit sick in my stomach, kind of the same way I felt when I saw my sister stealing a grape from a supermarket when she was three and so I had to tell on her because stealing was wrong. So what was it that made me feel all icky on the inside? Little girls, and I mean little as in three and four, videoing their own makeup tutorials.
Technically they weren’t videoing it themselves, an adult was helping them, but after that initial ‘aren’t you so adorable I want to squish your gorgeous little chubby cheeks’ moment the cuteness wore off as foundation and concealer and powder and eyeshadow and eyeliner and mascara was applied under the guise of ‘play’ and ‘fun’.
Maybe I’m a youngish stick in the mud, or maybe I’m just a bit old fashioned, but surely kids who are three or four, or even ten or eleven, should be having fun by playing in dirt with sticks or playing mummies with a baby doll or dragging out their mother’s pretty dresses and draping them about themselves like my sisters and I would do when we were kids? Or is makeup application for ‘fun’ an extension of that for modern children who seem to grow up a heck of a last faster than my friends and I did?
Or is allowing a child to not just play with makeup but actually experiment with adult makeup products up there with allowing little girls to walk around in heels? And I’m not talking the cute ‘look at me copying my mummy by tottering around in her oversized heels with her bra on my head for a hat’ look, but in actual child-sized high heeled or sort-of-heeled-but-sooooo-inappropriate-for-a-child heels. Is letting them loose on video with makeup just as wrong as putting them in kiddy size t-shirts with stanky slogans like ‘ready and willing’ or ‘bad girl’?
As always I’m trying to look at it from the other perspective, yes makeup is fun (I love it!), yes it’s grown up and I get that little girls like to copy their mummy, yes a little clear lip gloss and a mummy/daughter at-home manicure with bubblegum pink glitter infused nail polish would be an adorable thing to do. But to let a little person play with the whole kit and caboodle, then to upload a video to YouTube for the world to see? I just don’t get it.
Maybe I’m super out of touch? Maybe it’s ok to allow preschool kids to take playing grownup to a whole new level I’ve never seen before? I asked around BRHQ, which has a mix of mummies and non-mummies in a range of ages and the responses I got were ‘my daughter is too beautiful to ruin with makeup, although she has stolen all of my eos lipbalms’ and ‘I hate it, what are we teaching girls?’ and ‘Milky has his own clear lip gloss so he can get ready with mama, that is all!’ So it would seem I’m not the only one who isn’t keen on letting little ones delve into their mama’s makeup collection, even if on the surface it’s cute and ‘fun’ and ‘for play.’
So what say you? Would you let a little (as in under five) girl (or boy) play with proper adult makeup? And if they wanted to film a makeup tutorial for YouTube would you be happy for them to do it? Has some of the world gone crazy or does Tab need to wake up to the fact that kids have changed and the world’s not what it used to be? Chat away!
Nope don't like that at all! Can't even comment too much on it as I would probably write a novel! All I can say is let them be little girls and one word - pedophiles! The internet is just too dangerous.
I have a 2 & a half year old daughter and no, will never do this or let her do it