"It's problematic to show girls devoting this much time and attention to their skin," said Dr. Molly Hales, a dermatologist and medical anthropologist at Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine, after she and her co-authors spent weeks watching the same content a thirteen-year-old would see. That is the sentence to sit with, not the ingredient list. The industry's critics keep arguing about retinol concentrations. The actual study is arguing about attention, cost, and a sunscreen step that keeps going missing.
Hales, along with Sarah Rigali, Amy Paller, Walter Liszewski, and senior author Tara Lagu, published the first systematic look at this content in Pediatrics in June 2025. Two researchers created TikTok accounts self-reported as thirteen-year-olds and logged the first 100 unique skincare videos the "For You" feed served them, 82 different creators, 98 percent of them girls, just under a third of them thirteen or younger. The average video applied six products to one face, at an average cost of 168 dollars. The most-viewed videos carried, on average, eleven active ingredients flagged for elevated risk of allergic contact dermatitis, a sensitization that, once it takes, can persist for years, dermatologists say. Alpha hydroxy acids, citric, lactic, glycolic, were the most common actives, and they raise sun sensitivity. Only 26 percent of the daytime routines shown included any sunscreen at all. One video applied ten products in six minutes; by the end the presenter's face was visibly red.
That 26 percent is the number worth repeating, because it flips the usual complaint about kids' skincare. The problem was never how many products land on the sink, an average of six per routine in the study. It is that those six are built around acids and retinol, adult tools for adult photodamage that has not happened yet, with the one product that would make an acid regimen defensible left out. A separate review published in the Journal of Drugs in Dermatology in September 2025 walked through the same four ingredient classes, retinol, AHAs, BHAs, vitamin C, and reached a flatter but consistent verdict: none of them has been thoroughly tested in children, and the documented risks in this age group are redness, irritation, photosensitivity, and dermatitis.
Set against that, the actual clinical guidance is almost anticlimactic. Dr. Teresa Wright, chief of pediatric dermatology at Le Bonheur Children's Hospital in Memphis, writing for the American Academy of Pediatrics' consumer site HealthyChildren.org, gives it in three steps: cleanse twice daily with something gentle, moisturize at night, and protect every morning with a broad-spectrum SPF 30 or higher mineral sunscreen, zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, rain or shine. No retinoids, no acids. "Children and adolescents have resilient, youthful skin that doesn't require adult-targeted products or complex routines," she writes. The skin is thinner and more easily irritated than an adult's, and it does not yet have the photoaging those adult actives are built to treat.
The policy response has split into two very different shapes. Connecticut's attorney general, William Tong, opened an investigation into Sephora in November 2024 after his office found anti-aging products with retinol and acids turning up when it searched the retailer's own site for "kids" and "gifts for children." CT Mirror reported that the case closed in April 2026 with a settlement, not a lawsuit and not a fine: Sephora agreed, without admitting fault, to require supplying brands to disclose age-suitability warnings, display those warnings on every product page where the items are sold, train store staff to flag unsuitable products, and keep a standing resource on its site listing them. "Our kids—especially tween and teen girls—are inundated with influencer content pushing product after product," Tong said, warning that not every product marketed to them online is safe or appropriate. "Far too often, that information is not clear," he added. No penalty attached, but the disclosure and training requirements are enforceable going forward.
California tried something with actual teeth and lost. Assembly Bill 728, from Assemblymember Alex Lee, would have flagged "anti-aging" products containing ingredients like retinol at the register, requiring an adult present for an in-store purchase and a pop-up warning online, roughly the same mechanism the state already uses for vape sales. It cleared its policy committee 4-2 in April 2025. Then it died without a floor vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee's suspense file, the graveyard reserved for bills deemed too costly. CBS News California found that nonpartisan legislative counsel had tagged AB 728 both "non-fiscal" and "non-appropriations," the only suspense-file bill that session carrying both labels, and that its own follow-up questions to Appropriations Chair Buffy Wicks about the discrepancy went unanswered. The Personal Care Products Council, the industry's trade group, ran paid social ads that CBS News California characterized as misleading, framing the bill as requiring an ID "to buy cosmetics." CBS News California also reported that one committee member, Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, had missed the first half of that hearing, including testimony from an eleven-year-old who described a retinol-containing mask leaving her unable to sleep from the pain, and that later in the same hearing she said on the record she was not convinced this was "a huge problem" among the teen girls she knew. The outlet does not say she reached that verdict because of what she had missed, only that the comment came after testimony she had not heard, in the same sitting.
Neither outcome required new science. The Pediatrics data already says what a preteen routine needs, and it is not fewer marketing dollars aimed at an eight-year-old's bathroom shelf, though that would help. It is a cleanser, a moisturizer, and a sunscreen she actually wears, which costs a small fraction of what the average TikTok routine does and carries none of the acid load. Connecticut got a retailer to say so in writing. California could not get a committee to vote on it.
