Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced this week that beauty retailer Sephora has agreed to a set of enforceable new safeguards governing how anti-aging skincare products are marketed and sold to children, resolving an investigation by the state’s Office of the Attorney General. The agreement is one of the first of its kind in the country and arrives against the backdrop of a booming, social-media-fueled skincare economy in which tweens and teens have become a major customer base for products that were never designed with their skin in mind.

How the Investigation Started

The inquiry began in November 2024, when Tong’s office sent a formal letter to Sephora raising concerns about the way anti-aging products were being marketed to young shoppers. The letter zeroed in on active ingredients commonly found in these products — retinol, alpha-hydroxy acids, beta-hydroxy acids, and other exfoliating or anti-aging compounds — and flagged them as ingredients that can be unsuitable, and in some cases actively harmful, to children’s still-developing skin. An adult using retinol at night to address fine lines is a very different proposition from a ten-year-old applying the same product in hopes of emulating a TikTok routine.

Tong’s office highlighted a dynamic that any parent of a middle-schooler will recognize: social media feeds, particularly on TikTok and Instagram, are saturated with influencer content pitching elaborate multi-step skincare routines to young viewers, often with the implicit or explicit promise that the products will deliver “glowing,” “clear,” or “youthful” skin. What the videos rarely include is any disclosure that many of the featured products carry manufacturer warnings against use by children, or that repeated application of strong actives to young skin can cause irritation, compromise the skin barrier, and in some cases leave lasting damage.

After sending the initial letter, the Attorney General’s office opened a formal investigation. According to Tong’s announcement, Sephora cooperated with that investigation rather than contesting it, and the agreement announced this week is the result.

What Sephora Has Agreed To Do

The settlement requires Sephora to put in place four specific, enforceable changes in how it handles these products. First, the company must require every brand that supplies it with skincare products to furnish Sephora with all warnings and disclaimers about whether those products are suitable for children under the age of 13. That shifts a significant portion of the compliance burden upstream, to the manufacturers themselves, rather than leaving it to the retailer to guess at what ought to be flagged.

Second, Sephora must clearly and conspicuously display those warnings and disclaimers on every product page where the items are sold on its website. “Clear and conspicuous” is legal boilerplate that carries real weight — it generally means the disclosure cannot be buried in fine print at the bottom of a page or hidden behind a click-through. Third, the retailer is required to train its in-store employees to identify products that may not be appropriate for customers under 13 and to relay the relevant manufacturer warnings when they assist those customers or their parents. And fourth, Sephora must maintain a dedicated resource on its website, also displayed clearly and conspicuously, that informs consumers which products may not be suitable for young children.

Taken together, the four measures aim to close a gap that has widened considerably in recent years — the gap between what a manufacturer’s own safety guidance says about a product and what a young shopper, shopping online or walking into a store, actually encounters at the point of purchase.

Why This Matters Medically

The Attorney General’s announcement was accompanied by a statement from Dr. Andrew Carlson, Division Head of Primary Care at Connecticut Children’s, who framed the issue in clinical rather than legal terms. Carlson noted that pediatricians are seeing more and more children using skincare products that were never formulated for developing skin, and that ingredients like retinol and strong acids can cause irritation and even long-term damage when applied to younger skin. His central message to families was deceptively simple: when it comes to kids’ skincare, simpler is usually safer.

That advice lines up with what most pediatric dermatologists have been saying for some time. Children’s skin barriers are thinner and more reactive than adult skin, and the sebaceous glands that drive both acne and oil production do not fully develop until puberty is well underway. For most pre-teens, a gentle cleanser, a basic moisturizer, and a daily sunscreen cover essentially everything their skin actually needs. The twelve-step routine being performed by the influencer on the phone is not only unnecessary — it can be counterproductive, stripping away protective oils and inflaming skin that was fine to begin with.

The Broader Picture

This settlement does not, on its own, change the product formulations on Sephora’s shelves, nor does it police what influencers post online. What it does is force one of the largest beauty retailers in the country to make the existing safety guidance — guidance that manufacturers have often quietly included on their own packaging for years — visible at the moments when it most matters: when a young customer is browsing the site, when a parent is handing over a credit card, and when a store employee is fielding a question.

It also sets a template. State attorneys general frequently watch one another’s consumer-protection actions closely, and an agreement reached with a national retailer in Connecticut tends to function as a de facto national standard, because it is rarely worth the operational complexity for a company to maintain one set of website disclosures in Hartford and another everywhere else. Other states considering similar action now have a playbook to work from, and Sephora’s competitors — Ulta, Target’s beauty section, the Amazon skincare marketplace, and others — now have a reference point for what regulators may come looking for next.

Tong credited Assistant Attorney General Tess Schneider, Legal Investigator Carly Smedberg, and Michael Wertheimer, Chief of the Consumer Protection Section, with handling the matter. The office has not indicated whether similar investigations of other retailers are underway, but the framing of the announcement — focused broadly on the flood of influencer content pushed at tween and teen girls — suggests the Sephora settlement is meant to be a first step rather than a final one.

For parents navigating the checkout line at a Sephora this weekend, the practical upshot is modest but real. The warnings that have always technically existed on many of these products should soon be a lot harder to miss — both on the shelf and on the screen — and the teenager asking for a $68 retinol serum will, at minimum, have to do so in full view of a label that says, clearly, that it was not meant for her.

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