The only answer to seven-year- old girls in make-up: Ban it
TO PARAPHRASE the words of Carly Simon, if you’re so vain, you’ll probably think this column is about you. And if you’re a teenage girl with a bag bulging full of make-up, you’d be right. According to the latest official figures on household spending from the Office for National Statistics, even girls as young as seven are now spending money on toiletries and cosmetics rather than on the toys, sweets and hobbies preferred by their brothers. And in another recent survey, over half of 12-year-old girls said they wouldn’t leave the house without first putting on blusher, lipstick and mascara. They spend hours following YouTube videos watching make-up artists show them the best shading techniques for applying layers of foundation which, on a thirtysomething woman, might be appropriate but on a young pubescent girl just looks sordid.
These are the girls we hoped might want to carry on the crusade to become astronauts or astrophysicists, or even Astroturf fitters. The ones we thought were going to rebalance the power system and fill the traditional male roles and be better at them. But no. Teenage girls are now too busy applying the slap. They are caked in it, in the hope that they will be ‘discovered’ on Instagram or at the school gate looking moody.
Like latter-day Cinderellas, they are living in a fairy tale that we seem to have no control over. Their role models are not the suffragettes they are discussing in school this year, but teenage models such as Thyane Blondeau, who first appeared on the front cover of a magazine at 13 years old looking 20. Or 15- year- old Olivia Forsbrook, who this week is avoiding her GCSE revision by strutting up and down the catwalk in Milan.
To be fair to Olivia, it was her own mother, Joanne, who sent photographs of her nubile child to a designer hoping she would be chosen to parade up and down in clothes for grown-ups – pat on the back there for making all other mothers’ jobs a lot harder.
I’d like to say how pathetic it all is, but that won’t help, and isn’t very nice. Besides, I also have a ten-year-old daughter who tries to apply blusher and lip gloss with the same gusto as I apply to screaming at her to take it off. The rest of the time she is checking her profile in the mirror because, like all her little friends, she seems driven by a vanity that demands way more than the dressing-up box of my youth or a borrowed smear of mum’s lippy.
Despite all our feminist efforts, we seem to have ended up with a generation who, if they’re not careful, will go down in history as Generation Vain. Well, the girls will.
IDON’T have sons but the young boys I see seem stuck on the sidelines staring in as their female peers stroll around dressed up to look twice their age while they are unable t o di s guise t heir squeaky voices and soft chins. They even appear to have given up trying to talk and hide their faces in featureless hoods. Eventually, they may recover their own confidence, but not before their perceptions of what women should look like have been warped for ever.
But what can we do? Well, we could impose a ban on the sales of cosmetics to children under 14 for a start. Certainly there is something rather sick about a child of seven who cannot even see over a cosmetics counter being allowed to buy products.
Is this a draconian idea? No. Is it a backward step? No. Why don’t we make it harder for children to throw away their childhoods?
And for those who are tempted to disagree, I ask you one thing: Are you voting to encourage more young girls to dress up as Lolita?
Rachel Johnson is away