Ah, to Be Young and Beautiful . . .

Being a girl is so much trouble. It always has been. Ask any female who’s ever slept in curlers or ironed her wavy hair straight.

While women have long tried to improve on nature, in the last few years spas and salons around the country have seen an influx of progressively younger clients seeking services their mothers didn’t indulge in until they were out of college and able to support their own beauty budgets. It’s not hard to find 12-year-olds who book $30 to $75 blow-dries every time they’re invited to a party, or 14-year-olds who go under the brushes of an $80-a-session makeup artist, then spend $100 to take home the tools of transformation.

“Some of my friends are so obsessed,” says Meredith Coyne, a 16-year-old from Naples, Fla., who recently became a redhead when her aunt treated her to a $550 make-over at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York. “They act like Jessica Alba just left ‘Dark Angel’ and they have to look good enough to fill in.”

Here’s what it takes to be cute these days: a great haircut, chemically altered hair color (preferably accented with highlights of another shade or two), any hint of frizz blown and flat-ironed into oblivion, professionally manicured fingernails and pedicured feet, waxed legs and sculpted eyebrows, skin bronzed in a tanning parlor or tinted with self-tanning cream.

The tab for this level of personal maintenance would rival the service bills of an aging BMW. All told, American teenagers spent $155 billion in 2000, up from $123 billion in 1997. They persuade their parents to spend another $100 billion, according to Teen Research Unlimited, a Chicago-based marketing company.

“If I read one more model or actress say what really counts is being beautiful inside, I’m going to vomit,” says 15-year-old Jessica Bell from Redondo Beach. “I figure I have two choices. I can go to bed every night praying I’ll wake up looking like a model, or I work at looking good, like all my friends do.”

Of course, teen beauty inflation is most prevalent among the privileged, yet experts who giddily report on the buying habits of adolescents would have us believe the entire generation is flush. The trend, which crosses ethnic boundaries, can be attributed to the influence of celebrities, to the growing acceptance of vanity in American culture, or seen as a consequence of more money, technology, media and expertise being within reach of those under 20. But, more than anything else, a shift in parental attitudes seems to be behind the escalation of power spiffing.

When the baby boomers were kids, symbolic barbed wire separated adult privileges and activities from those available to minors. Once the children of the ‘70s had children, they ditched the exclusionary style of their elders and adopted a spirit of inclusion. Youngsters were welcome at their parties, viewed as suitable restaurant companions and considered worldly enough to contribute to the most sophisticated conversations.

“You can’t color your hair till you’re older” was replaced by “if it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for my kid.” The logic couldn’t be more linear: Members of what has been labeled the most self-indulgent, shallow generation enjoy giving their offspring every advantage, and are encouraging them to acquire all the gorgeousness money can buy.

Many of today’s parents act like generous friends eager to share experiences, as well as their grooming secrets, with their children. In a world of calculators, a modern mom wouldn’t expect her daughter to read logarithms on a slide rule. So why insist a girl defuzz her legs with a plain old razor when waxing works better?

In Southern California, which is to the aesthetically driven what Hershey, Pa., is to a chocoholic, teenagers don’t have to save up their baby-sitting wages and sneak off to a salon. They aren’t hiding from feminist mothers who never outgrew their late ‘60s grunge moments. “When his daughters wanted to get their hair dyed, my husband paid for it,” says Vanessa Smith, the stepmother of three Hermosa Beach teens. “For him, it goes in the same category as food and shelter.”

The HBO series “The Sopranos” is part drama, part anthropology, so it wasn’t surprising that a recent episode illustrated how beauty rituals are practiced in an affluent American tribe. Meadow, the show’s teen princess, gave her mother a gift certificate for a day of pampering at a Manhattan spa as a birthday surprise. Carmela Soprano didn’t flinch when Meadow explained that she’d gotten one for herself as well and charged both to her mother’s credit card.

“Rather than drop their children off somewhere, so they can go do what only grown-ups do, mothers bring them along and welcome opportunities for girl bonding,” says Kirsty Doig, senior vice president of Youth Intelligence, a New York market research firm. “What mothers are saying is, ‘I can be your girlfriend.’ ”

Not only do the parents of teenagers behave like pals, they look like them. With the absurdity of a cat chasing its tail, the generations pursue the same beauty ideal--the look of an eternally nubile 29-year-old. Check out the audience at a performance of one of the geezer rockers like Rod Stewart. How old are those collagen-smoothed women wearing leather hip huggers and midriff-baring tops, anyway?

“Boomers were the first generation to embrace pop culture, and they’re all about staying young and beautiful,” Doig says. “Everyone wants to look the same. Mothers want to look like Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Lopez, and so do their daughters.”

Annemarie Iverson is editor-in-chief of YM, a leader in the growing field of teen magazines. “Many of our readers tell us they think their mothers are their best friends,” she says. “They actually like hanging out with them. Today, a lot of teen role models, like Christina Aguilera and Beyonce Knowles of Destiny’s Child, are ultra-females, very girly, high-maintenance beauties. We try to be realistic about what it takes to emulate their look, and it’s pretty obvious that that kind of time investment really doesn’t make sense.

“Parents often skip over teaching which beauty images are appropriate because they desperately want to be groovy. We used to get letters that said, ‘I want to color my hair, but my mother won’t let me. What should I do?’ We get those less and less.”

Shelling Out

a Small Fortune

The 9-year-old girl whose mother hires a jet to fly her and her 14-year-old sister in from Aspen to be tended by stylist Franck Verhaegha at the Joseph Martin salon in Beverly Hills isn’t typical. Nor is the 5-year-old daughter of a much-married television actor whose mother asked Beverly Hills colorist Stuart Gavert to give her little girl blond highlights, “just like Mommy’s.”

The rationale of one Pasadena father who shelled out $400 for a Japanese hair-straightening process that must be repeated every four months wasn’t standard, Gavert says. “The girl was 13 or 14 and whenever she’d complain about how much she hated her curly hair, her father would say, ‘Come on. There are kids who’ve lost legs and arms to land mines.’ ” A benefit of the professional straightening, the father concluded, was, “Now I don’t have to go on and on about the land mines anymore.”

Jennifer Wolff, however, would describe herself as very normal. She is a 17-year-old junior at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills. Her routine of salon appointments hasn’t changed much since she started high school and isn’t different from that of her friends. She hunts for beauty products twice a week at the Westside Pavilion or Topanga Plaza, spending about $50 a month on favorite brands like Stila and MAC.

Not above comparison shopping, when she thought the $350 salons charged to put in hair extensions was excessive, Jennifer found do-it-yourself clip-ons for $150. She liked the way acrylic nails looked but gave them up when she decided the $25 a week upkeep was too much. A $15 pedicure packs as much of a thrill, especially when it includes a flower painted on her big toe.

“When you see the gorgeous people on TV, and you want to look like them, you do whatever it takes,” Jennifer says. “It’s kind of sad and ridiculous, but everybody wants to be accepted. My mom can’t complain when I spend money on my appearance, because she does the same thing. She wears good makeup and buys good hair products.”

“Makeup and hair are a creative avenue for Jennifer,” Gayle Wolff says. “I try to put a limit on it, but it’s very hard to say no. I understand the peer pressure is really strong.”

Galloping vanity does have its foes. Mindy Caplow of Sherman Oaks considers herself part of a thoughtful opposition. She said no when her daughter asked to have her legs waxed at 11. Now that Emily is nearly 14, she’s allowed to have her eyebrows done occasionally, but hair color would not be OKd.

“Once you strip away the glamour, as mothers we’re sending a pretty negative message,” Caplow says. “I’m an interior designer, so aesthetics and beauty are a part of my everyday life. Yet we do a disservice to our daughters by giving them the idea that if you look good, you are good. That gives the girls a false sense of being complete.”

Emily devours beauty tips from Allure and Elle as well as the teen magazines but thinks that girls who wear too much makeup look “hard and mean.”

“Part of playing with makeup is just being a girl and experimenting for fun,” she says. “But when girls try too hard to look good, it’s a big turnoff. There’s a girl in my school whose mother takes her out of class when she has to go have her roots touched up. We think she’s a little lucky, but we also think: Who in their right mind would do that?”

Our Puritan forefathers didn’t think vanity was a sign of insanity. But it was surely a sin that paved the road to ruin. Worthwhile people, they taught, knew enough to be ashamed of being superficial. That quaint notion is losing its grip, as more Americans refuse to feel bad about wanting to look good. Today vanity is assuming a place among sanctioned American values.

Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty” (Doubleday, 1999), acknowledges that beauty has become an essential element of social and professional success. “As the natural beauty becomes less the ideal, there’s more permission for vanity and artifice,” she says. “We’ve accepted the idea that beauty is an asset that can be cultivated, and that gives young people more permission to do things that used to be considered extreme.

“If you examine the studies on how teachers interact with attractive or unattractive children, or the influence of appearance on hiring practices, it’s clear that appearance does make a difference. There’s less hypocrisy about that now. In the psychoanalytic literature of the ‘50s, even into the ‘60s, people who came in with concerns about their appearance were labeled sick or narcissistic. Someone coming in with those issues today would be seen to have a pragmatic reaction to a world in which beauty is rewarded. They’d be considered realistic.”