Over the past year, a friend’s daughter — let’s call her Lily — has repeatedly called herself ugly. When Lily is supposed to be brushing her teeth, she looks in the mirror with a frown on her face, eyes scanning her features with disappointment. Lily has wavy dark-brown hair; she wants straight blond hair.

One morning Lily put pink marker all over her mouth. The day before, a child at school had called her ugly, and she thought the “lipstick” would make her look prettier.

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Lily is 4. And she is beautiful.

How has the world warped this child’s view of herself? Why does Lily even need to care about looking beautiful at 4? Is she worried about getting a date for the class field trip?

More attention is finally being paid toward the harmful effects of social media on teens’ body image and mental health. However, a recent study my lab conducted suggests that we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Specifically, we discovered that among girls, a preoccupation with appearance starts as young as age 3.

In our study, we interviewed 170 children ages 3 to 5 to examine when kids start to value being beautiful. Across all of the measures that we assessed, girls on average greatly valued their appearances. Girls said that to be a girl they needed to be pretty, and looking pretty was important.

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When asked to select from an array of outfits and occupations, the girls in our study tended to select many fancy outfits and appearance-related occupations, like being a model or makeup artist. They showed good memory for pictures of fashionable clothing when these pictures were later hidden from view. When explaining why they liked a pop culture character, girls often said things like, “I like all the princesses because they are pretty.” In a previous study, young girls also tended to purchase many toys that focused on appearance (e.g., a vanity set) with play money.

Across both studies, not only did girls tend to care highly about appearances, but they also did so more than boys. Girls were about five times more likely than boys to say they liked a character due to what I refer to as “appearance reasons.” Boys more often cited “action reasons,” such as liking Spider-Man “because he jumps high, climbs and shoots webs.” Our study concluded that gender differences related to how much emphasis we place on beauty likely start in preschool.

While girls around the world have long been taught that beauty is of utmost importance, conversations with other gender development experts point to the early 2000s as a pivotal period when a new “girlie-girl” culture emerged. One driver of this culture was the launch of the Disney Princess franchise in 2000, which continues to enamor young girls. My two young daughters have probably drawn upwards of a thousand pictures of Moana over the past two years. Although Disney movies have evolved and now try to include more agentic heroines, the take-home message received by children still centered on beauty.

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By adolescence, children are already primed to be preoccupied with how they look — a vulnerability that social media, often a very visual platform, taps into and exploits. Decades of research have shown that tying self-worth to looks and having a distorted body image are linked to a whole host of negative outcomes, which can include poorer physical health (e.g., eating disorders, substance abuse) and mental health (e.g., depression). An unhealthy focus on appearance can also detract from a focus on school, interfere with academic performance and limit the career aspirations of young women.

If we know that emphasizing physical appearance sets girls up for unhappiness — or worse — we must rethink our words and actions that instill this value, and we must begin before adolescence and social media use.