In a bid to capture a younger customer than ever, makeup retailer Ulta Beauty Inc. is peddling an alluring new collection: toys.

For $10 a pop, it’s selling plastic mystery balls containing tiny replicas of some of Ulta’s most popular products, including butt polish and wake-up eye gel. They don’t contain any real cosmetics – but they’re convincing fakes.

Kym Robinson’s 10-year-old daughter, Skyla, came home from a playdate with one of the mystery balls. After playing with the toy version, now she’s keen on buying real Caffeine Energizing Hydrogel Eye Patches.

That’s precisely the point.

So far Ulta’s experiment with the line of 68 tiny replicas, produced in collaboration with Zuru Toy’s Mini Brands, seems to be making inroads. Executives called out the toys during the company’s most recent earnings, which beat profit and sales expectations for the quarter. Since the line launched in October, the collectibles frequently sell out in stores and TikTok and YouTube are awash with clips of young girls showing off their hauls. Kids under the age of 14 are “obsessed” with them, Ulta’s Chief Merchandising Officer Monica Arnaudo gushed during an investor day.

The tween skincare trend already has parents and dermatologists alarmed. This is a move to go after an even younger demographic.

Ulta could use an edge. Same-store sales growth has declined in recent quarters. The retailer lost out to major competitor, LVMH-owned Sephora, as Gen Z’s top choice for beauty products, according to the latest Piper Sandler survey, which polled teens with an average age of 15.8 years old. (Ulta came in second place.)
Despite the fact that children are years away from being able to afford the real thing, they’re an attractive target market for the beauty industry hawking a wide variety of products once thought too sophisticated, or simply uninteresting, to young consumers. Get them while they’re young and you might have a customer for life, or so the theory goes. Households with tweens — kids between the ages of 6 and 12 — spent $2.4 billion on facial skincare in 2023, according to NIQ data. That’s up 27% from the year before.

While Robinson said she was fine with her daughter getting a mystery ball, she was frustrated that some of the replicas didn’t seem “kid appropriate.” Robinson has had to explain to Skyla that some ingredients could do more damage to her skin in the future. The real versions of the skincare products in the toy collection contain anti-aging ingredients such as hyaluronic acid and retinol that doctors have found can damage and irritate children’s skin.

“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to complain about imperfections,’” Robinson said she told Skyla. “She’ll try to use my under-eye concealer, but I’ll be like, ‘There’s nothing to conceal under there,’” Robinson said.

Ulta is using the toys to “lure” children into stores, which is a cause for concern, said Dona Fraser, head of the Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) for the BBB’s National Programs’ Privacy Initiatives. CARU helps companies follow guidelines that protect children under the age of 13 from deceptive or inappropriate advertising.

Fraser worries that children as young as 6 or 7 will ask parents to go to Ulta to buy the actual skincare and makeup products.

“What is the message that you’re sending to young children?” she asks. “There seems to be this injection of pressure to be more beautiful or prettier, that you’re not OK the way that you are.”

Ulta’s Arnaudo said in a statement to Bloomberg that the response to the collection has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

“Mini Brands has been a viral social sensation for all ages, and we are thrilled to be the first beauty retail partner to bring their vision to life in stores nationwide and reach new and existing guests who are just as passionate about beauty as they are about these collectibles.”

A huge chunk of the unboxing videos feature Millennials (now adults) and teens as giddy as kids about amassing doll-size versions of their favorite beauty products.
Still, there’s stiff competition to reach those demographics. But the younger Gen Alpha? They’re up for grabs.

“Each successive generation of teenage beauty enthusiasts is more engaged than the previous one,” Ulta’s Chief Executive Officer Dave Kimbell told investors in October. “Gen Z has certainly demonstrated this with a higher penetration of beauty enthusiasts than millennials, and Gen Alpha is on track to elevate this even further as they move into their teenage years.”

No surprise then that Ulta says it has even more toy products in the works.