Exploitation of Little Girls: Expensive Beauty Make-over Salons for Kids in UK & Child Beauty Pageants in New Zealand Under Fire (video)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on June 11, 2011
Newest trend: little girls getting beauty makeovers at expensive salon in UK
Beauty pageants for young girls and babies. Padded, push-up bikini tops and Botox injections for 8-year-olds.
Spray-on tans for little girls. Breast-feeding dolls. Facials for 1-year-olds.
Childhood is barely a blink as it is, but for some misguided parents wanting their little girls to become glamorous, sexualized young women, dressed and painted like the scantily clad Pussycat Dolls or Lady Gaga long before they’ve lost all their baby teeth, childhood is barely acknowledged. Or it’s an inconvenience.
Young girls are being exploited — “sexploited.” No wonder so many young people struggle with low self-esteem, grapple with their fragile sense of self-worth and place too much importance on physical attractiveness, devoting too much energy and worry on “achieving perfection.”
Here’s one of the latest outrages — trendy beauty make-over spas for children under 13 in Britain.
Outrage in the UK over beauty makeup salons for little girls
ITN News: A beauty salon just for under 13-year-olds
From Sky News, Beauty Salon Defends Makeovers For Pre-Teens:
A beauty salon offering makeovers and facials for girls as young as one year old has sparked outrage among campaigners over the sexualisation of children.
Trendy Monkey’s salon in Brentwood, Essex, caters only for the under-13s.
Treatments include fruit smoothie facials for £5, mini pedicures, manicures or make-up application at £7 each, hair ‘up-dos’ for £5-£10 and a shampoo, haircut and styling for £21.
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Despite concerns that pampering youngsters in adult ways could take away their childhood, Trendy Monkeys owner Michelle Devine defended her business.
Speaking to Sky News Online, she said: “There’s no sexualisation of kids involved – all we are doing is just having harmless fun and making children feel like little princesses.
“The most extreme thing the girls can have done is to have temporary butterfly tattoos. Everyone who has a little girl will love it.”
But Phoenix Chief Advocate Shy Keenan told Sky News Online: “This is outrageous – it is giving children a complex about the way they look from the age of one.
“We should be empowering children to feel beautiful naturally – not making them think that they have to do this in order to feel beautiful.
“It’s true that around 12 and 13 years old children do become interested in makeup. But this is different – this is about parents exploiting their children.”
From BBC News, Row over children’s beauty salon in Brentwood, Essex:
A child protection charity has expressed concern over a new beauty parlour in Essex aimed at youngsters.
New firm Trendy Monkeys in Brentwood describes itself as a “kids fun salon and princess parlour”.
Claude Knights, director of charity Kidscape, said she was worried about the message the treatments give about the “commercialisation of childhood”.
But the owner of Trendy Monkeys, Michelle Devine, said the concerns were “ridiculous”.
“I am making little girls into princesses, that is it,” she added.
From Atlanta Journal Constitution, Spray tans, facials for 1-year-olds? British salon criticized for sexualizing kids:
Kiddie salons are not a new concept, but a salon in Britain serving only the under 13 crowd is being criticized for “sexualizing” young girls. The beauty parlor offers makeovers and facials for girls as young as one.
From Daily Mail, The cheapening of childhood: The Mail pays a disturbing visit to a makeover and manicure salon for three-year-olds:
WHILE most parents might prize a picture of their little girl’s first day at nursery, single mother Michelle Devine treasures a memento of a different milestone.
Her daughter Maddison was just two when Michelle took her for her first makeover at a beauty salon in Marbella. There, the former lingerie model looked on in delight as her daughter’s hair was curled and her cheeks daubed with garish rouge.
For most parents, seeing lipgloss on the face of a little girl is an unsettling sight. But for Michelle, 28, the snapshots of that day were the inspiration for the children’s beauty parlour she has opened in Brentwood, Essex. At Trendy Monkeys, girls can be grotesquely transformed courtesy of face masks, hairstyles and lipgloss in a world where no other colour exists but hot pink.
The shop’s sign declares itself as a ‘kids’ fun salon and princess parlour’. Downstairs there’s a jungle theme, matched incongruously with a mini Porsche for children to sit in while they have their hair done. As Michelle proudly declares: ‘Very Brentwood.’
Upstairs, there’s a pink sofa, a pink stereo, stacks of pink towels, a pink hair-drying hood and — would you believe it — even pink princess thrones. Two staff, barely out of school, busy themselves organising nail polishes and butterfly tattoos.
One of the sylists, Ellie-May, 17, uses a tiny brush to draw a Cupid’s bow on the lips of a three-year-old. As Ellie-May pushes a tiara back through the girl’s wispy blonde hair, she says, ‘You look like a real princess,’ and the child purses her face into a shiny smile.
In Michelle’s mind, there’s nothing wrong with exposing young children to all this — she is simply providing a service by giving girls exactly what they want. ‘If a mum comes in here and her one-year-old wants something done, who am I to say No,’ says Michelle.
‘I’m an Essex girl — and I love what that stands for. Essex is about glitz, glamour and going over the top. Every little girl wants to be a princess — it’s the way they are made. It doesn’t do any damage.
At the end of the day, if they get covered in make-up, parents put them in the bath and wash it all off again.’
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Once the Pandora’s box of beauty is opened, it can be hard to close again. Teachers I have interviewed talk of their frustration at girls spending their breaks not in the playground, but applying lipstick and eyeliner. The last thing they need is to be launched on that catwalk at the age of three.
Yet worryingly, seven to 12-year-old girls are spending £24.3 million a month on beauty products in the U.S. alone. And where the U.S. leads, Britain follows. Argos, Toys R Us and even John Lewis are already selling make-up for girls as young as five.
By casting our children as princesses, we encourage them to believe it’s a woman’s lot to be pretty and passive until a prince comes along.
From the Herald Sun a few months back: Emilia, age 5, and her mother prepare backstage for a child beauty pageant featured in Toddler and Tiaras
There is also growing outrage in New Zealand against child beauty pageants — Ugly backlash to kids’ beauty pageant:
American-style child beauty pageants featuring young girls in heavy make-up, glitzy gowns and big hair styles are coming to New Zealand.
An organisation called Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants, based in Austin, Texas, confirmed that it was planning to hold pageants in several New Zealand cities for young Kiwi girls.
The pageants are renowned for young girls being spray-tanned and made to look much older than their years in a bid to win huge cash prizes.
The industry is synonymous with the unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey at her home in 1996. The case attracted worldwide media interest which often focused on JonBenet’s participation in child beauty pageants.
This week Universal Royalty owner Annette Hill told the Sunday Star-Times details were still being worked out for the New Zealand pageants and she could not say when they would be held or where, other than to confirm there would be events in several cities.
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NZ Pull the Pin spokesperson Rachel Hansen, an educator who works with teenage girls, said the organisation was founded on the belief that girls were already under so much pressure regarding their bodies. “We don’t support any kind of beauty competition, be it glitzy or natural, when these girls are not old enough to make an informed decision about what they’re doing.
“I am very concerned about little girls being judged on their beauty because of the messages it sends when they are asked to parade around. In my job girls are telling me they are under immense pressure from the media about what they should look like.
“It starts very young and many feel they are not sexy enough, not skinny enough and not hot enough.
“We just think that these pageants should not be part of a Kiwi kid’s upbringing.”
Child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, before the 6-year-old was murdered
From TVNZ, Child beauty pageants heading downunder:
Texas-based company Universal Royalty Beauty Pageants has confirmed it’s planning to hold child pageants in Australia and New Zealand.
But New Zealand’s Next Top Model judge, Sara Tetro, is slamming the concept, saying pageants for young girls are never okay under any circumstances.
Tetro says there’s a difference between using beauty as a job for commercial purposes, and elevating a child’s status based on genetics and hair curlers.
Tetro says it’s farcical, children grow up far too quickly and don’t need to be judged on how beautiful they are.
On a somewhat-related note, the controversial teen-sex-and-drugs MTV reality show Skins has been cancelled.
About the author
The notion the kids “want’ to do this makes me see red! The kids just want to please the adults. I was hoping the murder of Jon Benet Ramsey would have been made meaningful by putting a stop to this crap.
Dang, I can’t believe I’m split on this one. Pageantry, pageants, cupid bow lips on a three year old, rouge on a one year old is all very idiotic and parents should be slapped for putting them through that. Making girls feel that is normal is ridiculous.
But, the idea of a kids salon with haircuts, fingernail polish, plastic tiaras and temporary tatoos doesn’t bother me. Dear daughter occasionally had her fingernails done with her aunt on a “girls’ day out”, normally in some outrageous kiddie color. I have a pic of her in a princess dress & tiara at four. (Disturbingly, I have a pic from when she dressed her poor brother in a tutu and tiara…) And she’s now a 10 year old, soccer playing, rough and tumble scholar. And we’ve all probably at one point or another had our face painted at a fair. BUT the salon doing more than haircuts for a one year old is stupid.
Some great points made here, Beckybeq. Love hearing about your daughter – one just never knows how they will turn out, does one?
[...] be for aging housewives looking to impress the pool boy or the pizza delivery guy. Now, suddenly, children are on the list to get their look “revitalized”. A one year-old getting a facial? A one year-old needs that like Charlie Sheen needs another case [...]
[...] be for aging housewives looking to impress the pool boy or the pizza delivery guy. Now, suddenly, children are on the list to get their look “revitalized”. A one year-old getting a facial? A one year-old needs that like Charlie Sheen needs another case [...]