Why slime is the start of the slippery slope for tween skincare

You have to let them screw up, kids, don’t you? You have to let them lick the armrests on buses and drink puddles and ride their scooters like absolute dickheads and all that mad horrid stuff, because that’s how they grow and thrive and whatever. It suddenly becomes harder, though, I’m finding, when said kid approaches their teens and begins experimenting with makeup, specifically: lipliner.

You have to really hold it together. You have to hold your criticism on your tongue like a boiled egg, not even releasing a word, not even saying, for instance, the word “clown” and certainly not, “It looks like you’re drawing a mouth on to a balloon” or “JUST LET ME DO IT BABE, THIS IS TORTURE!”

What makes it worse is, and maybe you know this already, modern lipliner is not the stubby pink pencil of my youth. No, modern lipliner, as advertised by angelic girls on social media (platforms my daughter has no direct access to, but which still seem to have influenced her by osmosis, the heft of the advertising such that it arrives I think through the school water fountains or raspberry-scented air outside Mooboo), is painted on then peeled off, leaving a rioja-coloured stain that must be worn until bedtime or adulthood, whichever comes first.

I find the thriving tween beauty market troubling politically, but also personally and also daily, as my daughter idly inspects the ingredients of my various hag creams and pleads for a minibreak to Sephora. While previous parents might have fretted over weed as a gateway drug for teens, my equivalent is the single-use face mask and plumping lipgloss. But this week I had a good little talk to myself.

I do this now and then, when I realise that by worrying away at a parenting anxiety I am burrowing into a hole it will be difficult to climb out of. The talk often involves compromise, or compliments, or both, very fast, one after the other. Anyway, the talk was inspired by a trip to Argos or, to be accurate, the Argos catalogue, a fascinating land that asks, “What if the internet hadn’t been invented?” Then, “And what if shops were bad?” It was while I was flicking through its laminated pages to find a dehumidifier (long story) that I rested for a while on the toys. And there I found Gui Gui – “The most beautiful slime ever.”

I’ve long had issues with slime which, by the turn of the 21st century, had become a toy shop staple, not to mention ground quite badly into my upstairs carpet. I once read a very good piece in the London Review of Books about a newly translated history of slime that explained how Jean-Paul Sartre thought “sliminess” denoted “a type of contaminated morality” and I tended to agree. But this new slime, which comes in a range of “irresistible fragrances”, invites young customers to “slay your scented slime styling for a major glow-up” and is packaged in a jar reminiscent of the Sol de Janeiro beauty products my daughter’s friends covet, gave me a moment of raw clarity. I realised something.

Skincare is slime! Slime is skincare! So much of skincare, I realised, is not about skin itself, but instead the sensual touch of something slippery, and the ritual attempts at psychic protection, and the pretty little pots, all lined up. The introduction of a slime that connects the two, allowing girls with one foot in childhood and the other in the stinking quagmire of adolescence to play with beauty culture, much like a toy cigarette, or syringe, makes dark but perfect sense.

Of course, though, my daughter and her friends, already having spent their birthday money on a single lipliner, wouldn’t look twice at Gui Gui. Its customers will be, in my wizened experience, far younger, I think around six. And it could be argued this stuff might extend the shortening lifespan of a girl’s relationship with toys, delaying their entry into beauty capitalism, but I’d put the value of an entire Argos catalogue on the fact that instead it will work to lubricate their access to the beauty market, a place where anti-ageing products are already aimed at three-year-olds, keen to cleanse their skin, presumably, of the ravages of naptime.

But you have to let them screw up, don’t you? Partly to not be a shrew, obviously, but also because – there is some relief in seeing a girl apply makeup badly. Scrawling it on as if face paint or felt-tips. Those purple scribbles mark the vast distance between kid and teen, and the slippery, slimy journey to adulthood. I intend to drag it out as long as possible, without nagging even once.