Welcome back to Roar: The Podcast, Season 4. In this round table podcast, sophomore Jackie Duran, sophomore Amanda Troll, and sophomore Ellen Vu discuss the constant struggle of women with aging.

Speakers:

• Sophomores Jackie Duran, Amanda Troll and Ellen Vu

Transcript:

 For reference:

J – Jaclyn Duran

A –  Amanda Troll

E – Ellen Vu

J: Hello everybody, welcome to Santa Clara’s The Roar Podcast.

A: I’m Amanda Troll. I’m a sophomore at Santa Clara High School, and I’m a staff writer for the Roar.

E: I’m Ellen Vu, I’m a sophomore at Santa Clara High School, and I’m also a staff writer for The Roar.

J: I’m Jackie Duran, I’m a sophomore at Santa Clara High School, and I’m also a staff writer for The Roar.

So today’s topic is going to be about women’s constant struggle with aging, and recently there’s been a trend that younger girls are trying Sephora, trying to buy unnecessary makeup for their skin. Then on the flip side of this, there’s also a trend with teenage girls or women trying to buy stuffed animals or bows or overall trying to feel young again. This generation has a lot fewer stores for young girls to go into.

So for example, this generation has Claire’s and Justice, where they could see themselves and see their certain age group wearing these clothes, and so that influenced them. We also had magazines and less social media, and since social media has kind of catered towards older women now and teenagers, these younger girls or tweens have no idea what they’re supposed to be saying.

A: Our generation had JoJo Siwa and other influencers that gave us a sense of young feeling like Justice and Claire’s, but nowadays this new younger generation doesn’t have an influencer like that. The closest would be Charlie D’Amelio, but even then there isn’t that sense of childhood to her.

J: Because that was still in 2020 she was at her peak, and even then, she was doing dances and wearing, not even wearing childish clothes like we were.

A: Also she was 18 – around 18. She was a high schooler when she got there, but she was also doing dances that aren’t for the little children, like 10-year-olds to be doing.

E: I think there’s also different versions between us and them, since their versions are more mature now. They’re going to Sephora, Ulta, getting makeup, but when we were younger, like I feel like 2000, 2010 kids, we had Claire’s. We didn’t have Brandy Melville and all that, but we have Justice, and those stores aren’t as popular with little kids anymore as they used to be.

A: Yeah, we had places to go for that childhood outlet where the younger generation doesn’t.

J: Building off what Amanda said about these influencers, we had Disney Channel and little YouTubers doing things like “Days in My Life,” or “This is how I get ready for school in the morning,” and it was very much accessible.

I feel like all those things that we saw people wearing or people using, it was accessible and it wasn’t really focused on trying to grow up. It was more focused on it’s okay to be your age and just live through that age before you want to grow up. Now, especially with TikTok, everybody just wants to grow up super quickly.

Everybody wants to be like a famous influencer, and it’s so easy to become an influencer on TikTok, whereas on YouTube, it was a lot harder. This generation of little kids, it’s so easy for them to watch anyone blow up, but we only had a specific set of YouTubers that we could look up to.

A: There’s so much media nowadays that the influencers we had… there were only a select few. Nowadays, everybody is consuming so much media every single day, and their role models are people that are our age and part of our generation. The norm for them is going to Sephora and getting harmful things like Retinol, Drunk Elephant ‘cause that’s what they expect – not exactly expected – but that’s the expectation of what it means to be…

E: That’s all they have to go off of.

A: Exactly.

E: I think it’s really sad ‘cause when I walk into a store with toys, I’m thinking, wow, when I was a kid, I would have loved this. I would have bought this so quickly. I look back to my younger family members, like my cousin, she’s ten years old. She’s all… her Christmas list.

I used to have toys, Barbies on them. She wanted Korean skincare, Sephora gift cards, makeup. She’s only ten, and she’s telling me how, at school, other girls, they have the Shiseido eyelash curler, and how she wants it so bad. I feel like little girls shouldn’t be wanting makeup at that age.

A: Yeah. I feel like nowadays with how much the world changed because of COVID and everything just all of a sudden be blasted online, skyrocketing off the charts. The media is just influencing them so much more than it influenced us. So many kids nowadays have phones and platforms on social media (that) it’s expected of you to have a platform. Not only is it a platform, but an account, it’s expected of you to have that account on social media and be a part of this. When I talked to my friends, or, well, used to, they didn’t have Instagram, they didn’t have Snapchat and stuff like that, or they didn’t, even like, if they didn’t have an iPhone. They had an Android or something like that, (and) it was frowned upon, almost, so that pressure from society to be a certain way, have certain things.

J: I feel like, another thing that kind of feeds into these younger generations wanting and over-consuming so many products they don’t even need, is that now, Gen Z is becoming more parents, and so, they’ve only, at least at their age, like as a parent, they don’t really know how to control their kid without an iPad or without a TikTok or a social media account because, again, Disney Channel isn’t really big anymore, and there’s not magazines, and people really aren’t reading anymore, and so, parents don’t know how to control their kid without an iPad, and the media. If a kid has an iPod, they can do anything. They can look up anything. There’s Google. There’s even just YouTube or TikTok. You can look up whatever you want. There’s basically no restrictions, and kids will find their ways around restrictions. So just the parents teaching their kids or not, not teaching them, but not restricting enough of the media.

Whereas when I was a kid, I had an iPod touch at six years old, where my dad filtered through the songs I could listen to, to make sure they were appropriate, and I didn’t have a real phone until, I think middle school, maybe sixth grade because I walked home and so I only use my phone for that and to text people. Now phones for little kids are – every kid has an iPhone 15 where they watch TikTok and listen to whatever they want and they’re not really restricted – so it just kind of causes them… Again, it’s like, they grow up too fast.

A: Yeah, when I was little, I didn’t have… I used to go on runs with my family, and I only had a phone for that purpose. It always stayed in my parents’ room. The only thing I could do off that phone was… I used to binge watch the trailer for “Descendants” over and over again because I had no platforms of social media.

I had no other things to watch because I wasn’t allowed to. Whereas nowadays, everybody spent like a year and a half indoors on their phones only, so it’s like their childhood was almost taken away from them instead, in some ways for certain age groups because of how old they were when the lockdown started.

E: It’s also the thing with Gen Z parents, how there’s been the Beige Baby, the beige color trends, where parents would rather have an aesthetic lifestyle and have a nice color palette and rather having their children see actual bright colors. The places we used to go to when we were little, like again, Justice, Claire’s…

A: It looks like a rainbow threw up.

E: …and playgrounds they had a bunch of colors. But the stuff that Gen Z parents are buying now, it’s more muted. It’s supposed to be more soothing to the baby, but I feel like that just takes away color from their life.

J: Yeah, from the child, and kind of on the contrasting side of this not like, stopping, talking about the younger generations but more adults, they also, kids don’t have Disney Channel and so adults don’t have their own platform. Before, adults had Facebook and Instagram, where they followed their own specific styles, and trends were made for them because they were the only consumers. Now, trends are targeted towards anybody and everybody and companies will make whatever they can to make money.

So these older adults are, it’s okay to wear bows and have your own style, but they’re definitely chasing being young again, and also because Botox… Again, social media, you can change how you look and you can use filters. So because older generations don’t have their own platform, they don’t have their own trends because kids don’t have their own trends, it’s just all mixed around, which creates just a really weird generation of trends and styles.

A: I feel like people are also, because everybody is so influenced nowadays, I’ve seen how many people buy Stanleys, or certain makeup products and stuff like that, just because it blows up online and you’re told, “Oh, it’s good.” So then you think, “Oh, it’s good,” and you go try it out, not really knowing anything about it. Going back to the harmful skincares that little girls are buying. They’re on social media every day, and they see a couple of people say, “Oh, like I got this and it made my skin blah blah blah.”

You’re 10 years old, your skin hasn’t developed fully yet. You’re still young. You’re still beautiful. You don’t need these skincare products that you’re getting. It’s actually harmful. But you don’t know that because it’s just what social media has told you, and you believe what social media tells you.

E: I think at every age women keep feeling like they’re not beautiful, especially women in their 20s. They think that’s their peak already, they’re too old or anything, but that’s still the start of your life. Even now, I feel like high schoolers think, like, “Wow, we’re so grown up now, and time has passed by so quickly,” but we still have so much ahead of us.

The media pushes so much anti-aging stuff on us, like you said, Botox, and I feel like women are trying to go back to being kids again, with the trends of the stuffed animals, jelly cats, collecting those, squishmallows. People just want to feel young again, but then on the other side, younger children want to feel like they’re teenagers.

J: Yeah, there’s an overall discontent in living in the moment, and again, I think that’s also caused by social media because they see all these people. Anyone can fake anything so they can say that they went to Bali, or they went to Hawaii when they really didn’t, so overall, there’s this jealousy of every single age and every single type of person. Everyone on social media is just jealous of each other, and it’s just all platforms of jealousy, especially for women, because I don’t think men have a lot – at least not from what I’ve seen – a lot of trends that are catered towards them. They just have a set. While women have all of these trends like coquette, and clean girl, and all this. and men don’t have that, at least from not, not from what I’ve seen.

A: Social media is a mainly women’s thing. I’ve seen a couple of male influencers. Sure, there’s a lot of popular guys on TikTok, or on Instagram and stuff like that, and there’s like models, blah, blah, blah. But when you open social media, most of the things that you consume are about women. Regardless of your age, most of the time it’s about women’s things. Yeah, social media is just such a women-dominated platform.

E: We see so much of women getting hated on in social media that I feel like people have start – even older women are starting to hate on the younger girls at Sephora.

It gets to the point where.. it can be seen as annoying, like they’re messing up the stores, but they’re being called bad words, the b-word. We need to remember they’re still little kids trying to have fun.

A: Yeah, they’re only 10. They don’t know any better.

J: It’s all like jealousy and hate, again, for every age. I think I’ve noticed definitely since 2020, there’s just been this, “Oh, you can hate on whoever you want and it doesn’t matter and you don’t have to think about other people’s feelings” because since whenever we got out of quarantine, that is probably when all of the judging people kicked off, I think.

Because in 2020, everyone was weird, right? They were all alone in their house, but after that, when we finally got back to seeing each other, people forgot how to act.

E: I feel like people lost their social skills during quarantine because we need to remember that it was a year, or almost two years, being in our house, and the only thing we had to talk to each other was our phones and social media. So you could say whatever you want, and then no one, nobody could get you for it. You could say whatever you want behind a phone, and you wouldn’t face any consequences. I think people still have that mindset even now. They just say whatever they want, and it impacts other people.

J: Yeah, and that definitely ties into just… the struggle with aging and trends.

I think that this all… women’s discontent with themselves and little girls trying to be older and older women trying to be younger just ties into jealousy and overall judgment from social media.

E: There’s also a lot of hate for Millennials on TikTok and I think on every social media.

I think, we, Gen Z especially, we hate on the way they act, the way they dress, and I feel like this forces them to try to act younger again. I feel we, or not we, but especially Gen Z and social media, we hate on the way that Millennials, like the age group between like 25 and older, we hate on the way they dress, their slang, the way they talk, especially, and that forces them to try to act younger than they really (are).

A: Another thing I want to bring up is how the social media platforms we have nowadays, there’s no specific platform. I think you mentioned this earlier, Jackie. There’s no specific platform for the Gen Z generation or the younger generation. And then the older generation has like Facebook and Twitter, X.

That’s their main platform. They’re not really on our main social media platforms. They have, you know, Facebook and Twitter, but nowadays, there’s no specific platform for us. There’s just so many people that there’s no… on those platforms – on TikTok and stuff like that – the trends that are for our generation, like, the younger generation also sees them, and same with Instagram and, not really Snapchat, but the trends that are made and really popular, like everybody sees them now.

J: They’re catered for everybody. Everyone can take on their own version of it

E: For those types of trends, I feel some people do accept growing up. For Gen Alpha, they’ve had new jokes that I feel like nobody understands, especially for high schoolers. There’s other phrases that I feel nobody knows but we make a meme out of it because we don’t know. We just want to be included. I feel like that’s how millennials feel about Gen Z.

A: Fanum Tax?

E: Yeah, especially with fanum tax. We simply don’t know what that means because we’re not included in this joke.

A: It’s honestly only human to compare yourself to other people. I mean, with the level of media and influence we have nowadays, it’s kind of hard not to want to live up to these pressures and expectations that you feel.

But at the end of the day, you are who you are, and you’re perfectly exactly how you are. You don’t need all these things that you’re influenced to buy, these expectations that you feel you need to live up to. You are perfect the way that you are.

J: Thank you for listening. Jackie Duran signing off.

A: Amanda Troll signing off.

E: Ellen Vu signing off.

(altogether): Big Mouths, signing off.