I clearly recall a solemn conversation I had with a best friend when we were 13 about how we were never going to wear make-up, as any boyfriend worth having would like us exactly the way we were.
What a difference a generation makes. I only have sons, but that friend’s 12-year-old daughter has been interested in make-up for years and regularly wears it to school, despite it being against the rules.
Another contemporary of mine talks in bemusement of the disputes she has with her eight-year-old daughter who wants to wear lipstick to church on Sunday mornings. “I don’t know where she gets it from; I was never like that,” she says.
A mother of three teenage daughters, Una Rowe from Bray, Co Wicklow, sees girls’ preoccupation with make-up, clothes and a glamorised image as a “shackle” on their lives, “an unnecessary burden”.
However, it is primarily about girls looking good together and winning approval from female friends, she suggests. “They say they’re not doing it for men or boys.”
As teenagers we all had to fit in, she acknowledges, “but now there is so much more importance attached to looking good and preening oneself constantly. I don’t think it is healthy in the long term. But the arguments you could have about it could be more damaging.”
Her own three daughters have reacted in different ways to growing up in a world where promotion of glamour and sexualised imagery is everywhere you look.
The eldest, Wendy (17), was never particularly interested in discos and wore little make-up, Rowe explains. Fiona (15) is completely different; she likes to go to discos and is very conscious of how she looks. The youngest, Anya (13), “has seen both and is probably taking a middle path”.
Describing herself and her husband as “fairly easy-going” parents, she says they would question the behaviour rather than lay down the law about it.
“You can’t see why their natural beauty isn’t good enough and you ask them why are they doing that? They’re doing it because it’s ‘cool’.”
Rowe’s main concern would be the emphasis on thinness and the danger of developing an eating disorder. “The pressure to be thin is very difficult. If there is any area of lack of belief in oneself, it comes out in an eating disorder now.”
She also believes that girls can be inclined to give up more worthwhile hobbies as “shopping and shallow beauty routines” become their principal leisure activities.
Conscious of the importance of parents as role models, she keeps reaffirming that she does not care what people look like and encourages talk about friends in terms of what they’re doing in their lives.
However, she adds: “We forget just how old and fuddy duddy we appear to our kids.”
