A Recession-Proof Consumer Demo: Little Girls
Sign of the apocalypse number 567: It's not only teenage girls who are joining adult women in spending vast sums on make-up, hair products, and beauty treatments. Nor is it only tweens. According to research by Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds use lipstick or lip gloss, 38 percent use hairstyling products, and of course there's the now-notorious Dimples Kids' Spa in Brooklyn Heights (run, natch, by a Russian woman), where girls from 0-12 can get expensive mani-pedis and facials. So who or what is to blame for turning the nation's girl children into monstrous little patsies of the beauty industry? It's the internet, like you even needed to ask!
Social networking sites, message boards, and online ads mean that marketing for all manner of products and services can be achieved "with a speed and fury unique to this millennium," points out Newsweek's Jessica Bennett. And the web doesn't merely allow the efficient proselytization of using this conditioner or body lotion over that one, but relentlessly spreads images that are retouched and airbrushed to superhuman levels.
"My daughter is 8, and she's like, so into this stuff it's unbelievable," says one New York mother. "From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities." Oh well, between men screwing up the economy and upcoming generations of women too busy looking in the mirror to do anything constructive, it looks like China will be our brutal overlord even sooner than we thought.
