It’s not an exaggeration to say that Jessica DeFino transformed my relationship with skincare. After reading her newsletter, The Review of Beauty, I started questioning the purported “anti-aging” benefits of the products I was putting on my face and asked myself what it meant to buy into a philosophy of “anti-aging” in the first place. DeFino has probably saved me thousands of dollars on skincare.

I am, however, aging. The newest target audience for beauty advertising is decades younger than me: the teens, tweens, and even younger kids flocking to brands like Evereden. And despite some movement toward body positivity since I was a teenager, it feels like young people are growing up in a world with more exacting beauty standards than ever, from viral challenges that pressure them to work on their bodies all the time to ultra-normalized plastic surgery to weird ideas about guys’ eyelashes. To be young today is to be bombarded with a dizzying variety of messages about your own beauty or ugliness, coming from some of the world’s biggest companies as well as from influencers who are ostensibly your peers.

To help me unpack all this, I reached out to DeFino, who got her start as an editor on the Kardashian-Jenner beauty apps, then became disillusioned with the beauty industry and evolved into one of its most incisive and influential critics. In a conversation that has been condensed and edited, she and I talked about MAGA beauty, the potential harms of slathering your skin with retinol at age 8, and why helping young people push back against our disordered beauty culture has to start with examining our own anxieties.

Kids’ interest in skincare is often portrayed as fun or harmless, DeFino told me. But beauty “is a multibillion-dollar industry that is built on insecurity, whose physical products and procedures often have very serious physical consequences, whose messaging has very serious psychological consequences,” she said. “We must take it seriously.”

How common is it for kids to be using........

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