Just a Girl in the World
By Anna Wesche
IN THIS EDITION: This week, Flamingo’s original podcast, Unruly, returns for it's second season! Host Anna Wesche is spending the first episode with Elise Hu, author of Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital.
They’ll explore the phenomenon of “Sephora tweens” and unpack how constant messaging around beauty is impacting modern girlhood. Today, Anna reflects on her own adolescent relationship with beauty and how a changing media landscape is affecting girls today.
OUR BRAINS ARE COMPLEX SYSTEMS that fine-tune themselves throughout our adolescent years and into our 20s. When I hear the term “adolescence,” my mind wanders to junior and senior high school. But many researchers refer to this timeframe as the entire 14-year period between ages 10 and 24. I try to remember this when I see a young person, and I have the urge to tell her that appearances don’t matter as much as she may think. Why would she believe me? I know I didn’t believe it at her age.
The first product I remember wanting was foundation. My older sister, six years my senior, had one of those big bags of makeup sponges in our shared bathroom, little white triangles all packed together that I’d later find stained with liquid foundation in the trash. I used to dab at my face with them to see if I could squeeze out any remaining product onto skin that, in hindsight, didn’t need it.
But needing the foundation wasn’t the point; I wanted it. I wanted to look like my sister and the girls in Seventeen. By 12, I was eying the size of my pores, and by 14, I was desperately looking for something that could minimize the appearance of teenage acne. The smell of that grapefruit face wash can take me back to 2008 in a heartbeat.
All of it—the three-step skincare systems on TV, the pink and green mascara, the makeup that looked and felt like mousse—was consistently fed to me across just a few touchpoints, mainly television, magazines, and older idols like my sister or cousins. Now, in 2025, adolescent girls have beauty trends coming at them from all sides and can—maybe—only escape them when they close their eyes to sleep. Social media has connected us to each other, but it has also connected young people to media personalities much older than they are, and, inevitably, to trends intended for an audience at least twice their age.
I’ve come to believe that even if our well-intended messages are sent to systems that don’t yet have the software to compute what we’re saying, that doesn’t mean we should stop saying them. Young girls need to hear that beauty can be self-defined and participation in trends can be self-determined.
We created Unruly because we know women deal with a lot (understatement of the century), and we wanted to carve out a place where they don’t have to hold it all in. In Season 2, I’ll be chatting with your favorite writers, thinkers, and influencers about everything from dating in a recession, to cycle syncing, to consumer capitalism, and how to survive your annual girls trip, plus much more. Tune in weekly beginning July 9th and find us wherever you get your podcasts.
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Anna Wesche is the Senior Manager of Integrated Communications at Flamingo and host of Unruly. She also sits on the Associate Board for Girls on the Run NYC. |