Shay Mitchell Gets Why Rini’s Sheet Masks for Kids Made People So Mad

09.07.2026, 19:21 allure.com

For growing faces. Since launching in November, Rini, the K-beauty-inspired (the name is a colloquialism of the Korean word for children) kids’ skin-care brand conceived of by actor Shay Mitchell and public relations and marketing exec Esther Song has targeted a specific demo: the 4+ audience. And those growing faces, whether we like it or not, are also a rapidly growing beauty consumer demographic. While Gen X may have the biggest spending power (something a few brands are, miracle of miracles, paying attention to), it’s Gen Alpha (anyone born between 2010-2024) that’s fielding increasing interest from beauty brands. Rini included. “We’re on the younger end of Gen Alpha,” says Song. Market research firm Mintel projects that by 2029 Gen Alpha’s spending power—fueled in part, one supposes, by allowances and babysitting earnings, since the oldest among them will be only 19—will reach a whopping $5.5 trillion. And beauty is predicted to loom large in those purchasing decisions, a carryover of the frenzy started by a stream of Sephora tweens eager to mirror adult skin-care routines. Some are even starting their own brands: When YouTuber Salish Matter, then 15, debuted her skin-care line Sincerely Yours last year with an appearance at the Mall of America, nearly 90,000 fans showed up. The brand’s products quickly sold out at Sephora. On July 9, 12-year-old Stella Dorazio launched a line of four skin-care products made for “Gen Alpha girls on the move,” per Beauty Independent.

However, Mitchell and Song claim they’re not interested in courting the next gen of Sephora tween. “Our goal has never been for Rini to become a mini version of the adult beauty industry,” says Mitchell. The girls scrambling for “it” products by Glow Recipe and Drunk Elephant and seeking out active ingredients like retinol and glycolic acid that target wrinkles (which they don’t have) and boost collagen (which they already have in spades), are not, they insist, who Rini is for. But the brand’s decision to launch a kid’s skin-care line with sheet masks—a product that is decidedly not essential, but rather a visual marker of one’s commitment to a certain level of beauty industry consumerism—was met with a tsunami of online outrage. Obscene. Disappointing. Damaging. Unnecessary. Dystopian. This is beyond grim. The marketing image of Mitchell’s kindergarten-age daughter wearing one of the clear hydrogel sheet masks didn’t help, reading like a misguided attempt to attract attention in crowded social feeds.

Song thinks their timing was an issue: Rini launched in the midst of a broader conversation about how beauty consumers and influencers were getting significantly younger. There was much concern about the effect it was having on girls writ large. Reflecting via a phone call in early July, Mitchell tells me she gets the negative reactions. “Honestly as a parent I understand it and if I could go back, I would have started by telling more of the story before just showing the product,” says Mitchell. “I think people saw kids wearing face masks and immediately filled in the blanks based on everything happening in beauty culture and that makes sense.” If adults are being sold sheet masks to address and correct the various things wrong with our skin, it’s hard not to draw the same throughline with ones directed at kids. Now Mitchell views the whole experience as a teachable moment, one that will guide how the brand approaches their decisions, particularly around marketing, going forward. “More than anything it reminded me that context is everything,” says Mitchell. “I’m happy that it happened because now we can go and fill in all of the information that was maybe missing at the beginning.”

However, Song points out, plenty of customers did show up for Rini, sending, she says, an overwhelming amount of positive emails and reviews on heyrini.com. Although there is no publicly available information on how much revenue the brand has generated since launch, WWD reported that Rini saw $4.2 million in media impact value (an algorithmic metric created to estimate how much the social and traditional media posts around a brand are worth) in its first six months of existence.

Rini’s latest launch could create even more of a positive sentiment around the brand. It’s a daily care collection of Foaming Face & Body Wash, Daily Barrier Cream and Face & Body Lotion, all of which already have stamps of approval from the National Eczema Association and are EWG (Environmental Working Group) verified. Song and Mitchell see these new products as an opportunity to right the course… and cement their company as an emerging kid’s skin-care brand that’s both trusted by parents and coveted by their offspring. “We have a dual audience strategy where we speak to the parents through education and transparency and to the kids through the sensorial nature of our products,” says Song, who believes Rini can become the go-to Korean daily care line for kids, something that, as of now, doesn’t exist in the U.S.

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.

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