Things got a little ugly for Pretty Little Liars star Shay Mitchell this week.
After the actress unveiled a new skincare line for kids on Thursday, there was a swift backlash online against the idea of little ones being taught to use face masks and the like at such an early age.
“This makes me so sad!” a commenter wrote on one of Mitchell’s Instagram posts. “Let our kids be kids please!”
Someone else wrote that “we all know this disproportionately will be targeted at little girls who already deal with so much harm.”
There was more where that came from.
“Not to be a debby downer but this is ridiculous and clearly just consumerism for children,” another detractor fumed. “Kids don’t need skincare besides spf and maybe a moisturizer. Also they just shouldn’t even be thinking about their skincare anyways?? This is gross.”
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Mitchell for comment.
In a video announcing the new line, which is called Rini, Mitchell said the idea was inspired by her daughter seeing her wearing a face mark and asking for her own. Mitchell is the mother of daughters Atlas, 6, and Rome, 3, whom she shares with partner Matte Babel.
Swan Gallet/WWD via Getty
“And I tried to find her a sheet mask online,” she said. But what she found “shouldn’t be used for kids at all.”
She added that “the same was true for makeup,” referring to potentially harmful ingredients.
“I’m looking at all the things now that we eliminated from Rini products, and it kinds of makes us look at our own like, oh,” Mitchell said.
Rini pledges to use only mineral-based mica and plans to offer products including a healing ointment, a foaming body wash, and a daily barrier cream.
Again, though, none of this seemed to impress online.
While Mitchell highlighted in a post that her line would be “gentle” and used images of cute children, Rini was slammed as “disappointing,” “dystopian,” and “a terrible beauty precedent to start for children.”
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
As an actress, Mitchell is best known for her role as Emily on all seven seasons of Freeform’s teen drama Pretty Little Liars, on which she costarred alongside Ashley Benson, Troian Bellisario, and Lucy Hale. The show aired from 2010 to 2017.
Mitchell also appeared on TV’s Dollface and You.
