A new wrinkle: Makeup parties for young girls

Tiny, tarted-up vamps are etched on the country's collective retina after too many video reruns of poor Jon-Benet Ramsey strutting pageant stages. And too many mailboxes stuffed with catalogs hocking strapless costumes for junior sluts.

So it's not surprising -- in fact it's laudable -- that some parents may be at least initially wary when an invitation arrives to a 4-year-old's hairdo and makeup party hosted at a beauty spa.

It's a relatively new phenom in the Seattle -- one that, at first blusher, seems more suited to places like Southern California or Texas, where they're accustomed to little girls with big hair and training-wheel versions of their moms' artificial magenta talons.

"As women, we often hear about the pressures to be thin, wear the right clothes, and live up to impossible images on TV and in movies and magazines," one Seattle mom told me. "Then, as moms, we host parties that say what's important is to be pretty?" She'd rather have her 5-year-old play pin the tail on the donkey than paint on eye shadow.

Still girls of every generation play at gazing in mirrors with their mouths and lids sculpted in Mommy's Revlon or teeter on too-big spike heels with a couple of sweat socks strategically stuffed.

Do what you will to stress academics and athletics, and you still may find yourself with a kid who, for a while, won't leave the house without ruffles around her behind.

When her kid's beauty spa invite arrived, the above concerned mom made an excuse and declined. She didn't want to make a stink or see her daughter ostracized. But, if pressed by another parent, she would have said, "It's just not appropriate for us," and still not allowed her girl to go. "If parents really thought about it, really understood, I don't think any one of them would disagree," she said.

Erin Quigley applauds parental vigilance. The mother of 8- and 10-year-old girls, she also is the owner of Lily's Children's Salon and Spa on Queen Anne -- where "pampering birthday party packages" include manicures, pedicures, "salon-worthy" hair styling and a bin of dress-up skirts.

But, respectfully, she thinks it's the concerned mom who doesn't understand.

Her parties couldn't be sweeter, she says. Guests do not paint their faces in makeup -- unless you count a little nearly clear lip gloss and maybe a sprinkle of glitter in the hair.

All Quigley set out to do was find a good haircut for her girls when she happened on the space on Queen Anne and instantly envisioned it with butterfly walls, gilded mirrors and chandeliers "like a beautiful, little girl's dreamy bedroom."

She's right. The space is sheer confection. And, apparently, customers can't get enough. After only eight months in operation, birthday and "ultimate spa parties" -- raging from $250 to $325 or more -- already are booked two months in advance.

Quigley won't do "rocker babe" music or outfits. No pink or blue hair or eye shadow. Assembling junior bombshells would, she said, be "against everything I believe in." In her business, one walks a fine line on a very slippery slope, she said.

On one hand, a neighbor recently told Quigley that her kids would never cross the threshold of Quigley's salon because "we're not that kind of people." On the other hand, another parent implied that Quigley is a bad mother for being so strict she does not yet allow her girls to go on sleepovers.

Hairstyles at her salon's little-girl birthday parties generally run to French braids or "cute little pigtails" with ribbons or flowers.

But, across the bridge, Club Libby Lu's salon in Bellevue Square also is packing them in. Part of a chain started in the Midwest, the salon offers a somewhat different range of "services" and styles, including rock and pop star outfits and rocker hairdos as well as princess ensembles. And, yes, they include makeup. "But not too much makeup," staff member Ashley Cooper assured me.

"Some people do have questions (about the parties) on occasion," Cooper said. "But most realize it's just for fun." The age range of partygoers is between 4 and 11, although she recalled one 2-year-old birthday girl.

The parties at Libby Lu's -- which opened 2 1/2 years ago -- cost $22.50, $28 or $35 per guest, depending on the package.

Surely it can't be a bad thing if a party trip to a salon proves to a kid that grooming can be a good thing. But that concerned mom at the top is correct to worry about amping up the pressure to be pretty. And Quigley is right about that slippery slope.

It can't be a snap raising a girl with a strong self-image in an era of Paris Hiltonesque anorexia. There must be a middle ground between "lighten up" and "proceed with extreme caution." I'm just relieved that, as the mom of a son, I don't have to walk it.

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