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Like me, my seven-year-old daughter loves fashion. Can I protect her from a world of impossible beauty standards?

When she was younger, I took her to a catwalk show to glimpse my working life as a style journalist. But now, as the Ozempic craze takes hold and six-year-olds share skincare routines on TikTok, I wonder whether that was the right thing to do

Body dysmorphia, experienced by vastly more girls than boys, is on the rise; the so-called “Sephora tweens” are laboriously following elaborate skincare regimens, while 20-year-olds are having fillers and Botox under the dystopian umbrella of “prejuvenation”, demanding treatments before the first wrinkles can even emerge under the weight of their naturally buoyant collagen. In the fashion world, a predilection for the injectable semaglutide diabetes medication has slim women microdosing in order to drop a dress size; it’s emboldened an industry that, for all its tokenism, has remained steadfastly committed to a very thin, white western beauty ideal. It warned: “Due to a lack of regulation, it is impossible to accurately measure the number of children being illegally treated with injectable, prescription-only, aesthetic medicine each year.” I worry that one day soon, like the cartoon in her game, my daughter will know that she is being judged by the way she looks.

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