Is Gen Alpha the new Dorian Gray? Like Wilde’s Victorian protagonist, are our younger counterparts selling their souls for eternal youth and beauty? While it’s undeniably a stretch, I encourage you to indulge me in this literary comparison.
Reader, think back to your most recent visit to a local Sephora or cosmetic store. I’d be entirely unsurprised if you confessed that your trip was populated by an abnormal number of ‘tween’ girls flocked around the make-up or skin care sections.
Or rather, I invite you to reflect on your TikTok For You Page. Is it, like me, polluted with videos of young girls like ten-year-old North West depicting their several-step skincare routine? As enjoyable as these videos are, I cannot help but be drawn to the highly-coveted products used; particularly North West’s use of the Drunk Elephant Lala Retro Whipped Cream Moisturizer.
To college students, this skin-care routine is enviable, to say the least. My initial reaction was jealousy, longing for the products North unknowingly flaunts. Yet this momentary envy was offset by more overwhelming emotions: confusion and discomfort.
Why is a ten-year-old girl regularly doing expensive skincare and wearing makeup?
If you’re an English major or a literature nerd, you too may find Gen Alpha’s obsession with beauty products, particularly their use of anti-aging serums like retinol, oddly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both the infatuation with youthfulness and the overall strangeness of Gen Alpha’s behavior call for such a comparison.
Thus, I am here to raise the question – has Gen Alpha become the new Dorian Gray, giving up their childhood, just as he gives up his soul, for eternal youth and beauty?
Just as Gray’s disturbing portrait absorbs and embodies the age and wrongdoings of his soul, the hypothetical portrait of Gen Alpha epitomizes the faults of our consumerist society, for they have pushed today’s youth to this extreme.
However, this Wildean condemnation is not unanimously accepted. There are many counterarguments in support of this beauty resurgence.
For instance, some have cast Gen Alpha’s behavior in a positive light, arguing that their beauty obsession is merely a savvy and enviable form of self-expression. While this is technically true, it would be unjust to ignore the other implications behind their actions, chiefly the role of social media in formulating and perpetuating this youth-obsessed culture.
As a child, I recall TV programs polluted with anti-aging advertisements, marketing moisturizers and serums to women my mother’s age. My younger self struggled to comprehend the concept of anti-aging, for to someone so young, aging seemed exciting and not something one would wish to proactively stop.
How ironic then that today’s children now not only use anti-aging skin care, but wear make-up that ages them, and have the social media presence of an adult.
They long for youth yet behave (or attempt to behave) as if they were grown up.
Though certainly a form of self-expression, Gen Alpha’s actions feel more sinister than traditional sleepover activities – children playing dress up and innocently borrowing their mother’s make-up. Beauty has now become a fundamental part of their lives.
But what are the legitimate repercussions of this? I believe this beauty obsession inhibits Gen Alpha from being children, both physically and metaphysically. They no longer function as innocently separate from society, sheltered from its problematic nature. Now, they are at its centerfold.
Whilst physically they are damaging their skin barrier, the harm this causes is more than just bodily. Ingraining beauty standards within impressionable minds sows the seeds for lifelong discontent. Unloading cosmetic concerns onto children will create a hyper-cosmetically obsessed world, only exacerbating existing problems that stem from societal beauty standards.
Gen Alpha unknowingly embodies a fear of aging, taking precautions to maintain their adolescent (or preadolescent) glow. Yet they are entirely ignorant of the costs, just like their literary counterpart, Dorian Gray.
Whether the societal outcome of this movement will be as tragic as Wilde’s protagonist is unknowable, but the similarities are certainly eerie.