Trend: Pretty Babies

I remember greasy bangs and pimples keeping us in dark corners at our first boy-girl parties, and attempts — comical, of course — to cover said facial offenses with makeup stolen from our mothers’ bathroom drawers. Today, my girlfriends and I laugh when someone busts out evidence of “the ugly years” — the pictures from school dances, or those heinous school portraits from the fourth to ninth grades. They’re awesome. They make us feel better about how we look today. And they’re a reminder of everything we had to deal with, on our own, to grow up.

Which is what makes what’s coming down the road for the generation of tiny-tot Barbies so sobering. Without the ugly years, when do you learn to accept yourself?

The world has changed since my ’tweendom. Look at the media, and its obsession with fame, beauty, youth, celebrities, debutantes, celebutantes. It’s in our faces all the time. It’s in our kids’ faces, too. “It’s like this keeping-up-with-the-Joneses thing has stretched to our kids,” says Dasha Klein, a Main Line mom of an 11-year-old girl at Baldwin. She knows multiple teenagers who’ve gotten boob jobs for Sweet Sixteen presents, and a 20-year-old who gets Botox. “Except they’re trying to keep up with Hollywood — and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus and whoever else they’re looking at. Well, guess what? You’re in Philadelphia. And you’re a kid. You’re not Angelina Jolie.”

When I was in my teenybopper heyday,  there were no pop chicks who I aspired to be. There were boys I aspired to marry. The media world surrounding us made us boy-crazy — maybe not a fabulous thing for a 10-year-old, but at least it didn’t lead my friends and me to inject botulism into our foreheads before we could legally drink. It was innocent: We giggled, swooned, hung posters of Joey Lawrence and Luke Perry, giggled some more. And our moms were … uninvolved. They didn’t drop us at the playground with instructions to bring home the boy who looked the most like Kirk Cameron. They rolled their eyes, bemusedly shaking their heads as they passed by our rooms: Oh, you silly girls. End of story. 

Not anymore. Today’s girls aren’t looking at posters; they’re looking in the mirror. They have a new obsession — a self-obsession — and it’s being aided and abetted by their mothers. “It’s like this focus on their outer life is trickling down to their daughters,” says Rescue’s Albert. These women have to look a certain way, so inevitably, their young daughters, still under their control, do, too.

“It’s definitely all about perfection,” says Adolf Biecker’s Engle. “The mothers who bring their young daughters in are the women who are in here getting a pedi once a week, a bikini wax every two weeks.” It’s also, she says, kind of a social-status thing: “They’re not bringing their girls to the nail salons. They’re bringing them to high-end spas.”

BUT WHILE IT'S easy to vilify women who push prepubescent waxing on their children, things get a little fuzzier when it comes to, say, a nail-painting party, or spa facials designed for young, acne-prone skin (especially when you consider that girls are hitting puberty earlier than previous generations did). No mom wants her unibrowed nine-year-old ­getting teased at school, or a 13-year-old suffering the angst of bad acne when a solution is at hand. “Instead of the moms just staring at the drugstore shelves, trying to figure out what’s best for their daughter’s skin problems, they come in and have a professional examine her skin and help them out with the products,” says Keating at the Phoenix.

Anastasia Egeli-Deppe has been taking her 10-year-old daughter, who attends St. Peter’s School in Society Hill, for cleansing facials at Rescue since she started breaking out and having it pointed out at school. “I just figured she’d listen better to someone who wasn’t her mother,” says Egeli-Deppe. “I didn’t want to be harping on her to brush her teeth and wash her face, and thought this would be more effective.” Her daughter’s skin has improved, she says. “And as a result, she really takes pride in taking care of herself. It’s less about vanity and more about health.” A bonus: Time spent in the spa means mother-daughter bonding. “It’s nice, because I’m not buying her something,” Egeli-Deppe says. “I’m actually experiencing something with her.”

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