Meet the pre-teen beauty addicts
(like mozillo - image is everything eh? The best use of resources definitely I am sure)
By DIANA APPLEYARD and SADIE NICHOLAS - More by this author »
Last updated at 08:22am on 7th August 2007
Comments (21)
At nine, Bethany doesn't 'feel right' without fake tan. 11-year-old Belle waxes her legs. Karolina, 10, won't leave home without scent. Harmless fun? Or proof of the insidious sexualisation of our children?:
Bethany Conheeny takes two hours to get ready each morning. A detailed inspection of her morning routine gives some indication why.
After washing her naturally wavy hair, she spritzes, sprays and straightens it with £120 designer ceramic straighteners.
If there's so much as a kink left, she starts again. She's rigorous in her cleansing, toning and moisturing routine, and before leaving the house, applies a slick of lip-gloss.
At the weekends, it takes longer. Bethany — who has £70 worth of beauty treatments each week, including a spray tan, pedicure, manicure and eyebrow wax — applies St Tropez blusher, pink eye shadow and mascara.
She prefers to use a Chanel foundation over her moisturiser, but as her 37-year-old mother Catherine, a qualified beautician, puts it, perhaps somewhat mildly: "She's a bit young for that."
She has a point. Bethany is nine years old.
Yet she's far from the only pre-teen beauty addict to seem more concerned about her make-up than her exam marks.
Take 11-year-old Belle Chapman. Last week, Belle, a naturally pretty brunette, turned to her mother Cheryl and said: "I must get my legs waxed again, they are getting so hairy."
Cheryl, a PR executive from Reigate in Surrey, says: "Her monthly waxing costs me about £30, and she regularly has her hair highlighted, which costs £60.
"I spend more on beauty treatments for her than myself. She loves having facials. I put my foot down about her using tanning beds, but she is badgering me to have the latest spray-on tan. She's even had her arms waxed."
Bethany is on the books of a Leeds modelling agency. Belle, meanwhile, has already had modelling assignments for children's clothes catalogues.
Depressingly - but somewhat predictably - Belle's role models read like a contents page for a cheap celebrity magazine.
Like many of her friends, she idolises Jordan, Victoria Beckham and Girls Aloud. And her mother says she can't see anything wrong with that.
"Belle's done a few modelling jobs, and would love to get into showbusiness," Cheryl says.
"It started when she was eight, and wanted highlights putting in her hair and her ears pierced. She said all her friends were having it done and so I let her. She's a determined girl, who likes to be thought of as cool.
"In many ways she isn't a child at all — her obsessions are clothes, hair and make-up.
"She adores pink clothes and goes out wearing tiny tops showing her tummy, skinny jeans and her Ugg boots. When I was her age I wore jeans and jumpers and enjoyed playing out. She hangs around with friends at the shops."
Cheryl is divorced and also has a 14-year-old son, Caspar. Despite paying for her little girl's waxing treatments, she does admit to being disturbed by the way her daughter dances.
"She does all this very sexy dancing, 'shaking your booty' I think it's called.
But she has no idea how sexual the moves are. I wonder what's going to be left for her when she actually becomes a teenager — where is it all headed?"
Indeed. Though it's impossible not to feel that Cheryl only has herself to blame for encouraging Belle to dress like an 18-year-old.
Surely, she and Bethany's mother Catherine could stop pandering to their daughters' unhealthy obsession with their looks and refuse to pay for it?
Catherine says: "If her nails need doing or the tan needs topping up, Bethany complains she doesn't feel right - a feeling lots of women can associate with."
Of course, the uncomfortable truth is that, like Belle, Bethany is not a woman, she's a child, one of thousands of young girls being bombarded by society's confused and damaging messages as they grow up — messages it appears are being reinforced by their mothers.
At a recent family party, Catherine recalls how a 14-year-old boy pursued her nine-year-old daughter.
"He wouldn't leave her alone all night, which made me feel very uncomfortable," says Catherine, who runs a furniture business with husband David, 42, in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.
"But thankfully she told him she was nine and not interested in him.
"I felt a little guilty because of the part I play in Bethany looking older than she is, but all her friends are the same, and when she works hard at school I'm loath to deny her the beauty treats she loves."
Like the nymphets and faunlets in Nabokov's novel Lolita, British society, it seems, is fast breeding a generation of young girls being sexualised before their bodies have had time to develop.
It's a phenomenon once largely associated with America, where the spotlight fell on the high-pressure world of child pageants following the brutal, unsolved murder of six-year-old child model JonBenet Ramsey in 1996.
Now those same contests are being held up and down this country and children's charities are expressing concern.
Last week, it was reported that paedophiles were having online conversations about one British child pageant regular — 11-year-old Sasha Bennington.
Sasha — with her bleach blonde hair and blue eyes — was a finalist in the Miss British Isles contest last year.
A spokesman for the Online Sex Offenders Community monitoring team said: 'Sasha is now at serious risk. We feel that child pageants should be banned altogether.'
Pause for thought for Elima Jackson who spends £200 a month on beauty treatments for her ten-year-old twin daughters, Karolina and Daniela.
Both girls, who have modelled children's swimwear and dressing up costumes for Toys R Us, have expensive highlighted hair and go to a beauty salon near their home in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent each week to have manicures.
They may not be allowed to wear make-up to school, but they won't leave the house without running straighteners through their hair and spritzing themselves with Barbie perfume.
Far from being horrified that her ten-year-olds are obsessed with their looks, Elima, 30, encourages them.
She says: "I'm glad they like to look after themselves from such a young age."
She sees nothing wrong with the fact that her daughters worship Lindsay Lohan (who has just been arrested for drink-driving) and Britney Spears (who recently had a spell in rehab) because they are seen as 'pretty' and 'glamorous'.
The girls' obsession with beauty began when they were five and Daniela was chosen to model for the packaging of a light-up child's beauty box.
"It gave her a taste for it and her sister wanted to get in on the act too," Elima says. But it is the self-consciousness of these girls at an age when they should be carefree that is so alarming.
And Cheryl is all too aware of the conflicts at the heart of her daughter Belle's world.
She says: "She is conscious of her body image and is always saying things like: 'I am far too fat, my stomach is too big.'
"She's still got a little girl's body, and she thinks there is something wrong with her because she doesn't look like a woman yet.
"One day last year she came downstairs wearing a tiny mini skirt with stockings," she recalls.
"She looked like a mini prostitute, and I had to tell her to get changed. She looks 14. It's frightening, but I don't know what I can do to stop her acting and dressing like a mini adult."
Experts in America have already warned that a generation of young girls are being psychologically damaged by the relentless marketing of inappropriate 'sexy' clothing and toys.
And it's the same on this side of the Atlantic.
Last year, Tesco was forced to remove the Peekaboo pole-dancing kit from the toys and games section of its website, and a couple of years ago, Asda provoked a furore for selling inappropriately adult lingerie for children, including thongs and push-up black lace bras.
The Daily Mail columnist Bel Mooney, who lectures on the role pornography plays in society, says: "Go into town centres and you see pre-teen girls dressed as go-go dancers in mini skirts or navel-showing jeans with skimpy crop tops over their flat chests.
"Do parents have to hammer the nails in the coffin of innocence themselves?"
Set stories such as this together with the release of a UN study in February which said British children were the unhappiest and unhealthiest in the developed world, and a very worrying picture of Britain's young girls begins to emerge.
And what is especially worrying of all is the role of parents in all this and what appears to be an increasing inability to say 'no'.
Belle's mother Cheryl says: "I suppose the obvious response is that I could stop her, but the trouble is all her friends are dressing and acting like this, and she says it would make her too different."
Elima, mother of Karolina and Daniela, adds: "My partner rolls his eyes at the girls' beauty regime and says they should be concentrating on their studies.
"But I don't see anything wrong with what they are doing."
Meanwhile Catherine says her husband David is unhappy about Bethany's obsession with beauty.
"He's always telling her: 'You've got to be a child and that means you shouldn't be standing in front of the mirror putting make-up on.'
"I wouldn't let her wear heels or low-cut tops because that definitely sexualises children, but I don't worry about Bethany wearing make-up."
Gail Odell admits encouraging her 12-year-old daughter, Sarah-Jane, to be a model.
Last year she took part in the Miss Britain junior beauty competition and wore a sexy, low-cut black wrap-over evening dress and make-up.
"She absolutely loved it," says 42-year-old Gail, who runs an antique business in Warwickshire with her husband, Tom and is also mother to 18-month-old Chloe, Markus, five, Warren, 16, Lee, 17 and Craig, 20.
She says: "People might have a problem with children dressing up like this, but I think that modelling will be a very good career for her. She's very photogenic and a very pretty little girl.
"It was my idea for her to take part — we got into it after her little sister Chloe got some modelling work. People had told me that Chloe ought to model because she was such a lovely baby.
"I then looked at Sarah-Jane and realised she had potential, too. I think competitions like pre-teen pageants are fun — what harm can they do?"
Perhaps we should not be surprised that in a world where Jordan writes a novel and it shoots to the top of the best-seller list, girls are growing up to believe that looks hold the key to everything worth striving for.
At home in Woolwich, South-East London, seven-year-old Kayla Kirby- Archer loves nothing better than to have her hair styled and make-up applied. She loves the ballgown and tiara she wore when she won the first Little Miss British Isles beauty pageant last October.
"I saw the competition advertised on the internet," says her 28-year-old mother Donna, a full-time married mother of three.
"It did wonders for her confidence and she walked away with the title, a quad bike, £200, a modelling portfolio and an electric scooter.
"We're saving the money to take her shopping for outfits when she goes to have more photos taken for her portfolio soon."
According to Donna, Kayla's fascination with make-up began when she was six years old. She is already asking her mother if she can have her legs waxed.
For many, such behaviour may seem hard to fathom, but experts from the American Psychological Association point an accusing finger at toys such as Bratz dolls, voted Girls Toy of the Year in the UK in 2002, which come with eye make-up, miniskirts, fishnet stockings and feather boas, and embrace the slogan 'passion for fashion'.
Is it surprising then that young girls are receiving such mixed messages?
In reality however, it appears it's the parents who ultimately believe that beauty, success and financial security go hand in hand.
"It's their decision to model and if they didn't want to then I wouldn't force them," says Elima of her twins.
Catherine Conheeney says: "Bethany will need to be slim to be a model but I'm working hard to explain that she needs the right balance of food to make sure she's healthy. I've just entered her for a modelling competition to find the next Kate Moss."
Of course, some parents might feel that there is time enough to worry about such things.
And for those that do, the only way to fight back against pressures is surely to allow children to remain children so they can enjoy the few precious years of innocent freedom granted to them before they reach adulthood.
dailymail.co.uk |
