Tweens Are Invading Sephora & Adults Are Totally Fed Up

When I was a kid, around 11 or 12, I was begging my mom to wear makeup. She compromised with some drugstore lipgloss and clear mascara.

These days, it seems like (thanks to social media and influencer culture!) tweens are begging their parents for hundreds of dollars worth of Drunk Elephant skincare and Rare Beauty makeup. These are products meant for adults, and yet, the popular beauty product retailer Sephora is now crawling with tweens.

One TikTok user went viral for her call to action against this tween invasion, joking that she needs a 21+ Sephora store where no young kids can infiltrate her shopping experience.

“Sephora needs to actually shut down for just just a little bit,” Megan Lacey jokes. “The amount of 12-year-olds, I'm talking like 10 to 13-year-olds in there, like taking up every single section in the store is actually outrageous.”

“And I know people have already talked about this, but every time I go in Sephora now, there's always like a group of them surrounding an employee, talking about products, and employees literally like, ‘It's actually retinol like you actually don't need that.’”

Lacey understands young people have an interest in makeup and products that enhance their appearance as they enter puberty. That’s totally normal. However, the skincare craze that young kids, tweens in particular, are eating up is not normal, according to Lacey.

“Like I didn't even look in the direction of the Sephora skincare until like now that I'm like 22, like I don't really understand ...” she said.

She then blames influencer culture, and popular TikTokers like Alix Earle, who have large followings of tweens who look up to her, aiming to purchase the same products she uses, noting they need to “answer for their crimes.”

She says her experience shopping in Sephora is now ruined thanks to gaggles of young people disrupting her experience in the store.

“I literally go in there to walk around and take makeup recommendations from my employee crush who works there, and I can't even do that in peace now because I'm like, shoving around with like literal 12 year olds...” she joked.

Lacey’s comment section was filled with TikTok users agreeing with her notion that shopping at Sephora is no longer a peaceful experience thanks to groups of young people.

One user joked, “They should ID people at the door like it’s a bar.”

Another noted that tweens are not respectful when shopping at Sephora.

“Also the testers are now always completely trashed,” one user said.

A user agreed and wrote, “They need to start taking the testers off the shelf for like Drunk Elephant, and if they wanna test it they gotta ask for it.”

In another viral video, beauty TikToker Laurie DiBeradinis proved this theory, begging young people to stop destroying the testers at Sephora.

“Y’all were literally raised by wild animals😠😠😠 JUST STOP ALREADY,” she captioned the video showing the Drunk Elephant section at Sephra destroyed and tester product smeared everywhere.

“Dear younger kids and teens, can you please stop doing this to the testers inside of Ulta and Sephora?” she begs in a voiceover on the now-viral video. “It’s so disrespectful, like literally, who raised you guys like this? I am appalled.”

One TikToker, @itsdanealexandar, vented about his own experience encountering tweens during a trip to Sephora, claiming they were rude to not only workers at the store but also to fellow customers — himself included.

“Who is giving these girls the attitude that they have? It's like actually ridiculous,” he says in his video, calling this phenomenon the “10-year-old Sephora epidemic.”

While perusing the Rare Beauty products, Dane claims that a group of young girls came up to him, wanting to check out the same products. Instead of waiting their turn to have a look, Dane says one girl approached him and rudely said, “Can you move?”

The audacity!

“There needs to be like a genetic study on these girls because I can't be dealing with this every time I want to buy my Sol Di Janeiro at Sephora girl like come on,” he concluded.

Another TikToker, Hazel, noted her frustrations with tweens shopping at beauty stores like Sephora and Ulta, noting she is “all here” for a total ban on tweens. She also mentions that these kids are not even buying quality products, just things they see influencers use and assume it will be beneficial to their skin.

“Listen, these ten-year-old Madleine McKinsley’s, they need to be banned from Sephora,” she says in her video. “Everyone's saying like, ‘What happened to kids' stores? Like are Justice and Claire's even in business anymore? Why are we letting our kids walk around like they're 30 years old? You're 10!”

She continued, “You're 10. You don't need any kind of skincare. You don't need any kind of makeup. And I understand wanting that stuff and wanting to feel older because when we were all 10 or 12, we wanted to feel older. But, that is what that play makeup was for. That's what helped us feel older. That's what helped us pretend to be adults. OK, none of us were actually out there buying $50 makeup palettes or friggin' Drunk Elephant skincare.”

“The worst part is these products that these girls are lining up to buy, that these girls are clogging up the Sephora lines to buy, are not even good products. Like girlfriend, girlfriend, if you are going to spend $80 worth of your parents' money, at least buy a good product.”

As we know, skincare routines and expensive makeup collections have become normal for many tweens, some as young as nine years old. Despite this trend, experts warn against young people using abrasive skincare brands such as Drunk Elephant.

Dr. Brooke Jeffy, who is also the founder of Gen-Alpha and Tween/Teen skincare brand, BTWN, which specifically targets this tween age demographic, has previously expressed her concern.

“Tween skin deserves gentle care, not a pricey, extensive skincare routine! As a mom and derm, I’m here to spill the tea: harsh chemicals aren’t meant for those in-between years. Drunk Elephant products may be fine adult skin but for kiddos, it is definitely not! This skincare line is packed with potent ingredients meant for adults, not young skin,” she wrote.

So, if adults are fed up with kids shopping at Sephora and other “adult” stores like Lululemon? Where should they go instead?

One TikTok user made a case for these tweens, noting that there’s really no more “in-between” places that this age can wander into and feel at home. In her TikTok, @internetaunty, defends these kids who are lambasted by their elders noting that it’s society’s fault they’re all growing up too fast.

“Everybody keeps talking about how it's 10 and 12-year-olds at Sephora and Ulta, but they're not talking about how there's no tween stage of life anymore,” they begin.

“Once you turn like 10, 11, 12, you start jumping and doing stuff that you do like at 17, 18 because there's no gap in between because everybody forgot about the fact that kids are children even as teenagers.”

They go on to say that places dedicated to tweens like Limited Two and Claire’s are essentially “gone.”

“And I think people need to keep in mind when they're complaining that kids aren't kids because there's no space for a kid to be a kid,” they concluded.