Trend: Pretty Babies

Melanie Engle was trying to just pluck the stray hairs here and there. She was trying to deliver an age-appropriate eyebrow wax to her client. It was hard, though, because there was a foot tapping next to her, and a voice shouting in her ear: “No! Not like that — like a supermodel’s. I want them arched.”

After years in the beauty biz, Engle had seen her share of crazy ladies demanding perfect, Glamour-cover-worthy brows. But this Crazy Lady wasn’t talking about her own brows. The brows in question belonged to Crazy Lady’s daughter. Who was eight.

After sweating through the kid’s eyebrow wax, Engle, today an aesthetician at the Adolf Biecker Salon/Spa outposts in the Rittenhouse Hotel and Strafford — and, it should be noted, one of the most sought-after eyebrow specialists in the region — was directed to give her pint-size client a … bikini wax.

Engle was, predictably, extremely uncomfortable with the idea. But she sent the girl next door to the spa to have it done  anyway. “It was clear that this girl was getting a bikini wax no matter what,” she says. “Better for her that we did it, instead of her mother dragging her off somewhere else to get it done.”

Engle is sharing this tale with me one afternoon over my own eyebrow session, after I’ve remarked on another young girl — no more than 10 or 11 years old — ­sitting nearby, thumbing through a magazine and obviously waiting for some sort of spa service. As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. “But … there’s nothing there, right?” I ask Engle. “I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?”

“Nope,” she says. “There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.”

OVER THE PAST few years, we’ve witnessed the swell of a luxury-class culture — you’ve seen it in these pages, manifested in reports of $80,000 “push presents,” lavish condo buildings sprouting up like beanstalks, and weekends spent stockpiling couture with on-call personal ­shoppers. But just when we thought this consumerist takeover couldn’t get any worse, here comes the trend’s newest tributary: The kids of the pampered are being taken along for the ride, without a backward glance at the childhood left behind.

“I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?” Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. “It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.”

Engle’s anecdote might be scary, but it’s not her only horror tale. She’s seen a pair of sisters — one nine, the other 10 — brought in for microdermabrasion. (Note: Microdermabrasion sloughs off dead cells to reveal glowing “younger” skin beneath. Which is awesome if you’re, say, 45.) And at Adolf Biecker, it’s normal to see 12-year-olds coming in for their first eyebrow jobs.

There you have it — the new norm for young, privileged, growing girls. It’s not just designer clothes, luxury cars, and the best-of-the-best in schools, lessons and tutors: It’s narcissism, and it’s inherited from — no, encouraged by — Mom. Mom, who not only lifts, tans and waxes herself into oblivion, but who has now turned her attentions to her daughter, hauling her from spa to spa before the school ­pictures or big dance, or, well, just because — for facial after blowout after wax. After a handful of appointments, the transformation from little girl to prepubescent supermodel is complete, thanks to beauty ­treatments that not long ago were reserved for big girls — with little consideration that the same beauty treatments meant to fix “imperfections” will probably screw the kids up down the road.

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