Letters to the Editor
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New? Not Really
I'm over 30, and I remember pre-teen makeup kits from my childhood too. They usually involved a lot of glitter and lip gloss in various flavors. And have you shopped for little girls lately? I have a friend with a 4 year old, and kits with glitter lip gloss and stick-on nail decorations are everywhere. If Barbie is just getting in on this, they're late to the game. (But I remember a "make up Barbie" from my childhood in the 70's, so I don't think it's all that new.)
I got over my love of makeup about the time I got over my love of pink tutu's and playing dressup. It didn't seem to hurt me any, and I doubt it will scar today's girls either.
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Peculiar or not. New or not.
For some reason the image that first came to my mind was Jon Benet Ramsay, all tarted-up for a beauty contest.
Someday, maybe children will get to be children again.
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Barbie gets a bad rap...
My little golden-haired daughter and her best friend used to play Barbie Murders when they were about 6-7 years old. I would open a container on the table to find Barbie's head or her torso lying inside. Ken was the main murderer with Skipper a partner in crime. I was kind of glad when they started wearing Barbie lip gloss and glitter - at least it seemed a little more "normal" - though less imaginative. They also yanked out a voice box from a talking doll, wrapped it up in a blanket and walked around the block with the voice box in a baby carriage. If anyone wanted to see their baby, they held up this little mechanical object and cuddled it. Way weird.
The teachers through 6th grade had the right idea, no makeup at any time. Zero tolerance. My daughter didn't even try to balk, since there were no exceptions.
Since she is now married to a great guy, teaches acting and singing to kids and is pregnant, I suppose the Murders, the Barbie short-lasting makeup, and the pain of going to elementary school without makeup didn't warp her too badly.
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Yes, there was "play make-up"
when I was a young'n and you bet I got into my mamma's lipstick and powder. But all that stuff came off before I went out the door. It is one thing for little girls to daub their faces with rouge in the privacy of their playrooms. It is another if they are wearing it every day for school.
If that is goal of the purveyors of Barbie cosmetics then I think they need to be given a hard set down by parents and by educators. If that is not their goal then this is a tempest in a teapot.
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Thinking about it more.
The nail polish I'm remembering was a darkish magenta, not *quite* neon but close. It didn't smell like adult nail polish does, but aside from remembering that I don't remember what it did smell like instead. Its most notable feature was that it did not require a dangerous chemical to remove--it just peeled off.
As a child, half my fun came with putting it on and then peeling it off again. It was a pretty color. I wasn't thinking about being "sexy", just "pretty". Nail polish to me fell into the same category as the lovely velvet and taffeta Christmas dress my mother made me one year. It was completely and utterly modest--long sleeves, knee length, relatively high neckline--but it was *fancy* in a way that little girls my age rarely got to wear, and I was so terribly proud of that.
So I grew up liking cosmetics a lot, but never for sex appeal. In high school I bought nail polish in every color except the conventional ones. Green, blue, purple, gold. Sometimes when I was bored I'd wear opalescent lipstick and glitter. Sex was never the point. Still isn't--I'm getting plenty of it now, and I hardly wear makeup at all anymore. ;)
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Bratzification
Although I don't doubt that many of the women here played with cosmetics as children, I question whether they were really as young as the article mentions. It is hard for me to remember all that much from when I was six and seven. Are you sure you are not remembering playing with this stuff as an older child?
It seems to me that everything has been shifted forward. Tweens now act like like teenagers, and this is a push to have little girls act like tweens.
In any case, I find all this sexualization of childhood to be repellent. I suppose it is fortunate for me that I have only a son and another son on the way, because I would be prepared to fight to the death against Bratz, and I fear it might in fact be the end of me.
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Not So Sure,
Fun femininity, as I remember it at that age, meant going to town on a T-shirt with some pink puff paint and my brand-new Bedazzler. There might have been the occasional raiding of Mom's makeup case, but the end goal was to laugh at the silliness of a little girl playing grown-up.
Both my nieces were, from an early age, really interested in makeup and were constantly in my mother (their grandmother) 's makeup drawer. They were definately interested in emmulating the grown up women they saw around them, which is not surprising at all. Of course, they had no clue how to put it on, and it looked silly to us, but I think they took it quite seriously.
And I should add these weren't overy "girly" girls, either. One is a rambunctious archery and karate athelete. The other likes riding horses and excells in scholarly persuits. They neither of them wanted to live as princesses, though they had (have?) a bit of that in them. I think they went through pretty normal phases, and I suspect the Barbie makeup is planned as a part of that. To be discarded in favor of bikes or computer games or whatever comes next in a girl's development.
Do I think little girls need to start wearing makeup at grammar school age? No. But I also suspect Mattel is planning something far more innocuous than "sexing up grade school," which strikes me as an overly alarmist headline.