I received the products ahead of my interviews with Song and Mitchell and can confirm they are, indeed, excellent. My eight-year-old daughter who delights in bath or shower time (hair washing is another story) gravitated immediately to the body wash deeming it softer and nicer than the unscented bar soap she is usually handed. The lotion soothed her little eczema flares. The barrier cream may be formulated with children in mind, but I think any fellow perimenopausal moms with temperamental, often husk-dry skin may appreciate it even more.
Parents who are seeking out more information on the ingredients in their kids’ products will likely appreciate the formula facts tab on the Rini website. It highlights some of the key selling points for the line, along with high-level results from studies done with the brand’s products. (However, there is minimal information on the methodology and it’s unclear if these studies were done by the brand or a third-party, so they may be best taken with a grain of salt.) .
Song is proud of Rini’s stringent testing policies: They require raw material documentation from their manufacturer in Korea and test both the individual ingredients and the final formula for heavy metals, including lead, to ensure they are appropriate for sensitive and allergy-prone skin. Their testing includes EpiOcular evaluations to ensure everything is gentle around the eyes (which, any parent will tell you, is always a big pain point), HRIPT patch testing for skin compatibility, and pediatrician-led, in-use testing on babies and young children ages 0-5. Mitchell and Song’s goal is for parents to be able to purchase the products for their kids, worry-free. “We’re going to earn trust by solving real parenting needs, not by creating new ones,” says Mitchell. “If parents can, in the future, think of Rini as the brand that makes daily kids skin care, which can be so confusing, feel safer, simpler and also more fun, then we’ve done what we set out to do.”
Song thinks one silver lining from the sheet mask controversy is that it inspired some parents to look more closely at all the products their kids might be buying with that allowance at Sephora. My own hope as a parent of an almost tween is that it also might inspire broader conversations about how beauty culture, much like diet culture, can have a toxic and lasting effect on how we see ourselves. About the dangers of positioning beauty as a value and equating consumerism with self-care. About how, for every generation, our appearances have become something to alter and regulate and filter and optimize and, most importantly, monetize. Could a social media-stoked controversy about kid’s sheet masks be a tipping point for all that please?
When my daughter sees me doing various beauty and grooming rituals, from penciling in my eyebrows to shaving my legs to putting on a face mask, she’s first curious and then almost inevitably she asks: will I need to do that too? The question always stops me in my tracks and makes me pause to consider when it comes to beauty, what we need, versus what we want and what we feel obligated to do. I know that I’d like my eight-year-old to see any beauty products whether it be a sheet mask or nail polish or lip gloss, not as a necessity, not as self-care, but as a form of expression and fun and play. I gave her and her two cousins (a boy aged 10 and a girl, almost 4) the Rini animal sheet masks to put on one night last week. They all gingerly smoothed the masks over their growing faces, commenting about how they loved them and how weird and cool and slimy they felt. Then they looked in the mirror, then at each other, and they laughed and started embodying the animals pictured in the masks they had on their own faces. These kids’ immediate instinct wasn’t to make this a beauty treatment, but simply to play. And that felt, to this parent at least, very age appropriate.
