Shay Mitchell’s Rini Backlash Missed the Point About Kids’ Skin Health
As parents push back against “Sephora kids”, Rini’s founder breaks down the critical difference between viral anti-aging routines and essential skin barrier protection.
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When Shay Mitchell’s children’s skincare brand Rini launched in late 2025, it landed in the middle of a heated conversation about kids and beauty. The rise of “Sephora kids” and tweens following 10-step routines designed for adult skin had primed the internet for outrage.
So when Mitchell and co-founder Esther Song introduced a line for children, many people assumed it was part of the same trend. But whether a toddler really needs skincare has far less to do with beauty routines than with basic skin biology.
What actually separates a child’s skin from an adult’s has nothing to do with anti-aging, Esther Song told Melissa Magsaysay on the Live & Well podcast. “A child’s skin barrier is around 30% thinner than an adult skin barrier,” Song explains. And that difference is structural, not cosmetic.
“Your skin barrier is essentially a brick wall, and your skin cells are the bricks,” she explains, describing a wall with two jobs: locking in moisture and keeping out irritants and allergens. A thinner wall does both jobs less well, and everyday exposures like sun, pool chemicals and air pollution strip it faster than an adult’s.
How Korean Bathhouse Culture Influenced Rini’s Formulations
Song has been paying attention to this for years, not as a researcher but as a parent. She spent two decades in fashion and consumer goods, including a stretch at Tory Burch and a run as CMO of a publicly traded CPG company, before her daughter’s eczema reshaped what she was looking for on a label.
“Nourishing a kid’s skin barrier with the right ingredients and the right products to essentially just bring them back to homeostasis, because they’re losing amino acids and losing vitamins throughout the day, is essentially the whole objective of Rini,” Song explains.
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It is a framing that draws on her childhood in South Korea’s bathhouse culture, where daily cleansing and moisturizing were just what you did, not the ten-step K-beauty routine most Americans picture. “The ethos of Korean beauty is nourishing your skin barrier wherever you are in your developmental stage,” she says. “This trend of product layering and these ten-step Korean beauty routines, that’s not what actually Korean beauty is.”
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The 3 Stages of Children’s Skin Barrier Development
Song maps that idea onto three rough stages: infants and young children, whose highly permeable skin calls for strict avoidance of fragrance and acids; middle childhood, when the barrier is thickening but still stays away from anything active; and the teen years, when skin reaches adult thickness and hormonal shifts make targeted acne prevention relevant for the first time.
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Why Barrier Protection Is as Essential as Sunscreen
Sunscreen gets a pass from most parents because the stakes feel obvious and binary. A barrier cream doesn’t carry that same immediate cause-and-effect, so it often feels optional or even indulgent, despite children’s skin being more vulnerable than an adult’s. “People know if you don’t use sunscreen, you’re susceptible to skin cancer,” says Song. “It’s a very clear, if you don’t do this, you get this.”
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The skin barrier, by comparison, remains an unfamiliar concept for many American parents, even though they experience it every day. “When you get out of the shower and you don’t put lotion on and you feel your skin tightening, well, there’s your barrier speaking to you,” Song explains. “Maybe the name is foreign, but you recognize that you have a skin barrier and it’s saying, ‘Hey, nourish me.’”
That philosophy shapes how she thinks about Rini’s products. Daily essentials, including the foam wash, barrier cream, and lotion, aren’t beauty products in her eyes. They’re basic necessities your skin actually needs.
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That distinction is also rooted in her own experience as a parent. Song says her daughter struggled with irritated skin, leaving the family cycling through the familiar recommendations of cortisone cream and Aquaphor while searching for relief.
“I would try anything I could to ensure she could sleep through the night because it’s really hard watching your child scratch all night,” she says. “When Rini started, it was such a personal thing for me and my co-founder to create products that we knew other parents needed from a solution perspective.”
As for the online criticism that greeted the brand’s launch, Song wasn’t defensive about it. If the debate prompted parents to pay closer attention to what their children were buying, or to start reading ingredient labels more carefully, she sees that as a positive outcome. “If that caused parents to monitor what kids were buying at beauty retailers more or look at ingredients, we welcome it,” she says.
Listen to the full episode of the Live + Well podcast with Esther Song on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
