Kids Spend $168 a Month for TikTok Skincare Trends

Skincare trends popular with kids as young as age 7 can damage their skin while offering “little to no benefit for the pediatric populations they are targeting” — all while costing an average of $168 a month, new research says.

For the first-ever peer-reviewed study on teen social media skincare trends, researchers created TikTok accounts pretending to be 13-year-olds, then recorded the videos they claim were promoted to them on the social media network’s “For You” page. The study was published June 9 in Pediatrics, the flagship medical journal for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Researchers found that “skin care regimens on TikTok are costly, infrequently include sunscreen, and often involve exposure to ingredients that carry a risk of irritation, allergic contact dermatitis, and sun sensitivity.” 

A TikTok spokesperson told PEOPLE, “This type of content is common across all media, and the authors admit they did not assess its impact on teen well-being. However, they did find actual benefits to teen self-expression, parent-teen bonding, and building a supportive community on TikTok.”

The content creators using the beauty products were as young as 7 years old, the study says, but TikTok policy states that users must be 13 or older to sign up. The company notes that it also automatically sets young teens’ profiles to private and has removed more than 21 million accounts from young teens who have signed up with false birthdates to bypass the rule.

Each video reviewed for the study was arguably viral, with an average of 1.1 million views; the study did not specify whether specific search terms were used to find the videos.

The skincare routines in the videos were complicated and costly, with the study finding they featured “an average of 6 products, costing an average of $168/regimen.” Only 26.2% of the products included sunscreen — and in a review of the products used in the top 25 most-viewed videos on the researchers’ accounts, the study says they contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients. 

“That high risk of irritation came from both using multiple active ingredients at the same time, such as hydroxy acids, as well as applying the same active ingredient unknowingly over and over again when that active ingredient was found in three, four, five different products,” said Dr. Molly Hales, a board-certified dermatologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the study’s corresponding author, said in a press release on the study.

One mom told CNN that she found $300 anti-aging cream in her 15-year-old daughter’s room: “I got very upset,” Giselle Peña told the outlet. “It says it makes your skin ageless, improves fine lines, wrinkles and firmness. I was like, ‘This is not for you, girl.’ “

“It’s problematic to show girls devoting this much time and attention to their skin,” Hales said in the release. “We’re setting a very high standard for these girls. The pursuit of health has become a kind of virtue in our society, but the ideal of ‘health’ is also very wrapped up in ideals of beauty, thinness and whiteness. The insidious thing about ‘skin care’ is that it claims to be about health.”

As the study concludes, these regimens “offer little to no benefit for the pediatric populations they are targeting.”

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