Are kid spas gross or harmless fun?
Recently a friend who does a lot of traveling gave us a pamphlet he’d picked up during his globe-trotting. It was for a Scooops, a “kid spa” with various locations across the States (and one in Niagara Falls, Canada). The dessert-themed treatments include an Ice Cream Manicure, a Neapolitan package for “Grandma, Mommy and me” and birthday party packages, ranging from the Vanilla package to the Chocolate package, which includes manicures and pedicures, tiaras, glitter tattoos and feather boas for each girl.
We’re conflicted. On the one hand, where’s the harm in indulging little girls’ love of looking pretty and partaking in grown-up beauty treatments, just like Mom? Most of us can remember playing hair salon with our sisters and raiding our mothers’ purses for lipstick and blush when they weren’t looking.
On the other hand, it’s a bit…icky. We worry about little girls growing up too fast. And the whole thing just reminds us a little too much of the reality TV series Toddlers and Tiaras, which follows pageant girls and their awful mothers. Besides wearing makeup and getting ridiculously poofy hairstyles, the pageant contestants shave their legs and get spray tans. We get nauseated watching these girls parading around all painted up.
What do you think? Are we being hopeless squares? Or is there a danger in letting your young daughter get a mani?
Photo by heymrlady via Flickr.
