Pretty Babies: Turning Little Girls Into Women Much too Early
Philadelphia magazine has a disturbing article
called "Trend: Pretty Babies." It's all about the new trend of sending your eight year old off for a bikini wax and highlights. No, really, it's happening and it's just sick.
Facials, bikini waxes, mani/pedis and blowouts have long been de rigueur Rittenhouse and Main Line beauty regimens — but nowadays, the "women" getting these luxe spa treatments have yet to reach puberty.
Over the past few years, we've seen a tidal wave of this rising 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."
One mother demanded that her eight year old's eyebrows be "tweezed like a supermodel's" with a perfect arch. One six year-old gets a blowout every week --
"she expects it." Some spas and salons are refusing to straighten and highlight young girls' hair, but they know that the obsessed moms will just take their daughters somewhere else. This also reminds us of an episode of Sunset Tan in which the mom who marched her near-crying daughter into the salon demanding the "Lindsay Lohan"-- a session in a real tanning bed and then a Mystic tan over that.
We think these moms need a psych consult, stat. Because this is just nuts. What kind of values are these girls getting? That appearance is all that matters in life? That spending one's childhood being alternately tortured and pampered in a spa every week is normal?
We can't help but think of Princess Diana who took her boys round to the hospital wards in the evenings so they could learn about those less fortunate than they were. She also had them wait in line at McDonald's for hamburgers. Now that's teaching a child something important. We're all for spa and salon treatments, of course. But there is plenty of time for all that when these girls actually grow up.
