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When I was about seven, I started sitting by my mom’s side at her vanity, sneaking swipes of her beauty products when she wasn’t looking. As a tween, I gleefully rummaged through any retailer’s kids’ section; every tacky, medicinal-smelling lip gloss and glitter body spray wound up in her shopping basket. When I started getting acne a couple of years later, I turned to face washes designed just for teens, brightly coloured with overwhelmingly sweet and citrusy scents.
Children have always dipped their little toes into beauty purely for fun or fascination’s sake—so why, exactly, did the launch of Shay Mitchell’s Rini cause an internet meltdown? The brand debuted last week with five single-use sheet masks formulated for what it calls “growing faces,” and its campaign imagery features the faces of little boys and girls coated in colorful hydrogel or cotton sheets with animal-themed markings. Judging by the number of skeptical, dismissive, and even downright furious comments left across social media in response, the general consensus seems to be that kids just don’t need face masks—and that the products themselves amount to an immoral enforcement of beauty standards on kids.
I understood the visceral reaction, but I couldn’t help but see a disconnect. Even for adults, sheet masks are a tool for harmless fun or a simple means of boosting hydration—not a serious skin care treatment. But they do still sit within an industry that has historically demonized totally normal skin features (like wrinkles, dark spots, and acne) to market solutions to those so-called problems. Countless skin care products, some sheet masks included, come with the promise of a more youthful appearance—and a youthful look has become the expectation (or desire) among people of all ages, if the recent uptick in cosmetic procedures and the roughly $52 billion anti-aging market are anything to go by.
Courtesy of Rini
That’s why I think the real problem with Rini has far more to do with the current beauty climate than it does with the product or the concept of kids’ skin care itself. When a brand puts a child front and center in a skin care campaign amid all that context, sure, it’s natural to feel like the brand has dubious intentions of ushering children into a toxic cycle of self-consciousness and unnecessary consumption—but I’m not convinced it does. In its defense, Rini’s branding language makes no mention of “improving” kids’ appearances or so-called skin flaws; the sheet masks, according to the brand, are simply there to hydrate the skin and give kids an opportunity to follow along with their parents’ routines in a safe way. Mitchell defended her brand this week to clarify as such. “Kids don’t look at [face] masks and think about fixing [their appearance], they think about it being a cooling sensation and a shared moment.”
When you look at it through the same lens as the fake eye shadow palettes and empty perfume bottles many of us adored as kids, Rini seems less like a means to thrust skin care onto kids and more like a response to the realities of how parents and children already engage with beauty, play, and imitation. The brand failed to read the room when it came to the optics of it all, yes. But instead of talking circles around how problematic it is or isn’t, perhaps what we should be interrogating is the toxicity of the adult beauty culture that children are already absorbing and how brands can avoid contributing to it.
Back in the days when the smartphone was nothing more than a glimmer in Steve Jobs’s eye, kids’ exposure to beauty came almost exclusively from older family members or kid-focused products at the mall and in teen magazines. Now, of course, everything’s digital, and kids are instead introduced to products through TikTok routines and targeted product ads—whether they’re actively searching for advice or are fed that content at random by an algorithm.
“Instead of talking circles around how problematic Rini is or isn’t, perhaps what we should be interrogating is the toxicity of the adult beauty culture that children are absorbing.”
It’s not just about the branded content kids are seeing, either. Young girls are bombarded on social media with messaging about “pretty privilege,” the scientifically proven idea that conventional attractiveness gives you a socioeconomic leg up. It is a harsh reality that, especially for women, physical appearances can open or close doors. But rather than examining or questioning that concept, social media tends to amplify the pressure to perform by way of achieving physical perfection (just take a scroll through TikTok’s numerous “signs you have pretty privilege” videos and you’ll see what I mean). The message is: Beauty equals power and value. If you weren’t born with it, and you can’t afford it by way of products and procedures, you’re doomed. Anxiety-inducing, isn’t it?
It’s these elements of modern culture, where little to no boundaries exist between adults’ and kids’ digital worlds, that make Rini seem so much more problematic than it is. Enjoying a skin care product, and providing kids a safe way to mimic their parents (children learn and form emotional bonds by mimicry, after all), wouldn’t feel like such a moral downfall were it not for phones, social media, algorithms, and the impossible beauty standards that adults have set for everyone.
Instead of getting mad at every single brand trying to tap into the youth market, we’ve got to interrogate the landscape we’re in and understand where, exactly, we should draw the line in what we expect from brands that market to kids, tweens, and teens, including Rini. Personally, I never want to see a children’s brand start marketing a face mask to “correct” any part of a child’s appearance. Rini’s unicorn face mask, however? That’s exactly the kind of thing my 10-year-old self would have lost her mind over (in a good way) if she found one in a goodie bag at a birthday party. There would have been no mirror checking or wondering whether it was “working,” just playful exploration of the joys of self-care and expression. I’d hate for kids now to miss out on that because the adults are overthinking it all.