These days, it’s impossible not to notice the ubiquity of skincare products from popular brands such as Glow Recipe, Drunk Elephant and Super Goop — on your friend’s dressing table or bedside drawer, but most relevant, across platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

The data supports this conclusion. According to the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, 87.8% of students use skin products, while 80.8% use moisturizer and 71.5% apply sunscreen.

Specifically, many skincare brands can attribute their growth from grassroots to mainstream to the social media app TikTok. Many beauty influencers are commonly seen making “Get Ready with Me” videos that feature multiple popular skincare products targeted at young, mainly female audiences. 

The strategy works — after watching their idols on TikTok, young girls find themselves shopping at beauty stores such as Sephora or Ulta, throwing every product imaginable into the baskets. Sometimes, these are products they don’t even need and won’t use.

This begs the question: Are these people purchasing skincare products because they actually need them or simply because they are trending? 

Personally, I have fallen into the trap of buying overly-advertised products that are supposed to magically clear and brighten your skin within a couple of days. I have taken multiple trips to Sephora and bought products from brands such as Glow Recipe, The Ordinary, Charlotte Tilbury and Drunk Elephant that ended up collecting dust on my shelves within a few weeks because I realized that I had actually no reason to buy those products. 

Similarly, I know a lot of girls my age who have the clearest skin I have ever seen, and their vanities are stocked with products specifically made for people with acne. 

For example, when I was at my friend’s house, who has extremely clear skin and gets one pimple every three months, I saw she had a product that aimed to clear dark spots, so I asked her why she got that product and if she knew what it was made to do. 

Here’s what she said: “Nope, I saw it on TikTok and it smells really good, so I just got it.” 

That response perfectly captures how “skincare” has become nothing more than a buzzword for consumerism — for buying an endless list of items and products. No one really knows what the products do for them; they just buy them because they saw them on social media. 

Another example is the popular family TikTok account, “Garza Crew,” known for documenting the lives of their two young daughters, Haven and Koti. They often post videos of their six-year-old daughters using skincare products like retinol, eye brightening serums and multiple toners. Their comments are filled with hundreds of people saying that their daughters do not need any of these products, which is very much true. 

It goes without saying that six year olds do not need to be using eye-brightening products, but parents who merely want to make their children happy by buying these products do not know any better. Their parents are merely falling victim to the same vicious cycle of social media influence and consumer culture that occupies thousands of girls around the country. 

However, like all trends, we can hope that the misguided skincare craze will come to a rapid conclusion — and aesthetic, but useless, products will disappear from Sephora shelves and our dressing tables.