The first beauty experience is no longer the one you “never forget” When we skip the beginning phase of beauty routines
There was a time for all of us when our beauty journey truly began. A borrowed mascara, a lipstick in the wrong shade, an eyeliner pencil that followed everything except the natural contour of our eyes. It was a gesture learned from someone we admired, often a mother, an older sister, or simply a failed attempt in front of the mirror. It was imperfect, sometimes messy, but it was ours. There was no right way to do it, no guide to follow, no skincare routine to respect. It was an experience. One of those moments that, without realizing it, began shaping how we looked at ourselves, how we liked ourselves, and how we felt beautiful.
@jessypribeautycreator MAKE-UP E FIGLIAAAAA #tutorialmakeup #naturalmakeup suono originale - Jessica
Today, we enter already knowing (or believing we know) what’s “right” in beauty standards
Today, that phase seems shorter, or completely gone. There is no longer a real “beginning” in beauty. There’s no time for mistakes or slow discovery. Children and teenagers now learn from beauty tutorials, GRWM videos, and TikTok beauty trends. They no longer observe up close, but through a screen. And most importantly, they believe they don’t make mistakes, because someone has already shown them how to do it the “correct” way. Self-care no longer comes from shared gestures or personal intuition. Instead, it arrives already structured: references, trends, and clear aesthetic standards coming from the outside, sometimes even from content created by their peers.
My experience as a mother of two girls
As a mother of two daughters, one eleven and one four, this difference is clear, and I won’t deny it’s a bit concerning. The older one is already immersed in a beauty world perfectly explained by content creators. She knows what to use, how to use it, and when to use it. She already has a clear idea of what “works,” sometimes believing she knows more than I do, even though I often go makeup-free and skip my skincare routine before bed. The younger one, on the other hand, is still in a phase of creative chaos: she mixes, experiments, gets messy, and laughs about it. She’s not trying to do things right; she’s simply living her beauty experience. And I live with the fear that soon this will end, trying to keep her as far away from screens as possible. In this difference lies everything we are losing. According to various studies on identity development (especially during pre-adolescence), building a sense of self also comes through mistakes, experimentation, and confronting what doesn’t work. That’s where personal taste develops, and where we understand what we truly like. If this space shrinks, the way we learn to know ourselves changes too. The problem is not learning earlier, it’s no longer needing to learn at all.
@giovannalagnena_9 Risposta a @I suono originale - Anna la reginetta
Beauty as a missed experience
Today, beauty is more accessible, more inclusive, and more aware, but also more defined, more explained, and increasingly “correct.” When everything is already so clear, the risk is leaving less room for experience and personalization. Skipping the beginning phase means this too: arriving with an idea of beauty aesthetics without ever truly experiencing it. The solution is not to go backward, but to create new spaces of freedom within this precise system that wants us all to be perfect and expert. To allow space again for mistakes, imperfect choices, and products used without fully knowing why.
Beauty starter kit (essential, shared, not perfected)
If the first approach to beauty today is so guided, it might make sense to bring it back to something simpler and more shared, far from the obsession with perfect skin. Not high-performance products, but products that allow teenagers to begin and experiment with skincare and makeup:
- Gentle, neutral facial cleansers, without aggressive active ingredients
- Lightweight moisturizers, focused more on sensation than results
- Lip balm and light lip gloss, more about play than definition
- Soft mascara, ultra-gentle for sensitive eyes
The first beauty experience is shared and imperfect
The first beauty experience should go back to being a shared moment, not a performance to replicate from a tutorial. Not everything has to be right immediately, and not everything needs to be already seen. The first beauty moment you truly “never forget” isn’t the perfect one, it’s the one where we didn’t yet know what we were doing, but it made us feel good, and it made us feel beautiful.
