pic credit: daily telegraph

While we all take a moment to recover from that
nauseating news, let’s look at the bigger, less alarming picture. Even
here in Australia, beauty salons are becoming the new playground.

Why ride your bike in the street when you can pay a professional to
paint your nails? Especially since Mum and Dad probably won’t let you
ride your bike in the street because it’s dangerous.

When I was a kid, I didn’t know anyone who’d ever had a manicure. I
didn’t even know what a manicure actually was. Back then, it was a
mysterious practice a bit like ‘plastic surgery’ – something done by
posh women, far, far away. Not remotely connected to my life and
certainly not something I aspired to. The only thing painted on my
nails was stop-and-grow. And occasionally, when I was bored during
science, Liquid Paper.

Until I was a teenager, make-up was something strictly for grown-ups. Occasionally, I played around with Mum’s lipstick and eye shadow but I never lusted after cosmetics let alone beauty treatments. Make-up counters at department stores were as intimidating as a bottle shop and an equally inappropriate place for a young girl to spend money.

But now? There’s kiddie make-up everywhere. It’s as ubiquitous in the landscape of a little girl’s life as fairy wings and lollies.  It’s free on the cover of magazines for six year olds. It’s in toy shops and kids’ clothes shops. Brands like Barbie and Disney have their own cosmetics lines. And please don’t get me started on the evils of Bratz Dolls because I may never stop ranting, raving and generally gnashing my teeth and you may need to eventually sedate me with Valium to shut me up.

Little girls playing with make-up is not a new thing and it’s hardly sinister. What’s new is taking it out of the context of dress-ups at home and into the adult arena of a beauty salon. What’s new is having someone other than mum or a big sister or best friend apply the polish or the make-up. What’s new is paying for it. What’s new is beauty as a hobby, an activity for weekends and birthday parties.

But it’s too easy to just wag a moral finger and sigh about “kids these days” and the evils of the beauty industry marketing to children. It’s too simplistic to say “why aren’t they climbing trees and riding their bikes like we used to?”

There’s very little in life that’s the same as a generation ago. Just like our own parents never wore jeans in their forties or had mobile phones or email or drank bottled water or payed $5 for coffee with silly names like double skinny frappucino…it’s naïve to expect this generation of little girls to behave the way their mothers or nannas did.
`
That doesn’t mean mindlessly embracing every social change or not questioning things that feel wrong. You still need your personal lines in the sand. Mine include bikini waxes for pre-teens, little girls wearing make-up in public and have I mentioned Bratz Dolls?

But take a look at the bigger picture. Women in the previous generation didn’t get bikini waxes. Did they bleach their teeth? Use $100 eye creams? GHD their hair? Have spray tans? Blow-dries?

The kind of pampery behaviour that was once reserved for movie stars and bored, rich housewives is now fairly standard for many. Today there are cheap nail salons sprinkled liberally through every shopping centre and they’re packed with women of all ages and incomes getting $25 pedicures.

Facials, massages, manicures, teeth whitening, eyebrow shaping, fake tans, laser hair removal…. somehow in the past decade, these things morphed from indulgence to basic maintenance. They are to this generation what getting a haircut every three months was to previous ones.

In that context, it’s not THAT MUCH of a leap to the fact that little girls are having Princess Parties at beauty salons instead of playing Pin The Tail On The Donkey. I may not agree with it but I don’t condemn it.

FYI, the fact that kids’ parties have evolved is not a new phenomenon. I’ve been going to birthday parties as a parent for ten years and I’ve never seen a game of pin the tail on the donkey. It’s been years since I’ve watched kids play pass-the parcel. A pity perhaps but times have changed. So have we. And so have children.

Would it be lovely if they could have the kind of innocent, less materialistic childhood we had? Sure, but the genie is out of the bottle. Would you like to live the same life your parents did at your age? Want to give back your mobile phone and start wearing slacks or pantyhose?

Little girls want to go to beauty salons because Mummy does. And little girls will always want to copy Mummy. Just ask Kate Moss. Her daughter Lila is now four and behaves in exactly the way you’d expect of a supermodel offspring. As Moss told UK Vogue last year, "She comes in at bedtime and says, ‘Mummy, do you think this is a good look?’ and then she has a fashion crisis. Now we lay the clothes out before she goes to bed but then she goes, ‘Mum, I need options.’ When we were doing Versace [the ad campaign]…Lila and Donatella struck up a friendship. They put a weave in Lila’s hair and she had this long blonde hair down to her waist, and she was going like" – Moss tosses her hair back, vamp-style – "and I was like, oh … my … god."

Precocious? Inappropriate? Or just like mummy? Of all the behaviour that could be copied by a child of Kate Moss, I’d say hair flicking and being a fashion diva is the last thing to be worried about.