Manicures, pedicures and facials are no longer privileges of women and “big girls,” says the New York Times. Cosmetic companies and retailers increasingly market pampering services and beauty products to 6- to 9-year-old girls.

While traditionally young girls had their moms paint their toenails, dabbled with their older sister’s make-up or tagged along to beauty salons, it’s now not unusual for moms to host birthday parties at nail and hair salons. Some salons market specifically to children, with the largest primping party outlet, Club Libby Lu, performing one million makeovers last year in its 90 mall-based stores last year.

Samantha Skey, senior vice president of strategic marketing for Alloy Media and Marketing, told the New York Times that our culture breeds young girls’ desire to grow up faster. Television shows such as “America’s Next Top Model” and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace tell them they need to present themselves in a certain way to the public: “We live in a culture of insta-celebrity. Our little girls now grow up thinking they need to be ready for their close-up, lest the paparazzi arrive.”

Analysts label this behavior as part of a trend called KGOY, “Kids Getting Older Younger,” and link it to parent’s over-indulgence. This hyper-sexualizes young girls and turns them into consumers, according to Rosalind Wiseman, author of “Queen Bees & Wanna-Bes.”

Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, blogged his concerns about this issue recently. He told WoW that Christian parents have a responsibility to teach their children “the difference between pretty and truly beautiful.” Beauty goes deeper than the skin and is, instead, a matter of godly character. While physical beauty is sometimes celebrated in the Bible — as in the Song of Solomon — it is often presented as a snare: “We have got to learn that we are harming girls and young women by falling into the world’s patterns of praising aesthetic and cosmetic beauty alone.”

Here’s a Christmas gift for the girl who has already carved her thighs, ballooned her breasts and shrunk her tummy — a lobe job to plump up her ears.

Socialites may perk their saggy ears at the thought; but the death of Donda West, mother of rapper Kanye West, has heightened public awareness of the physical dangers of cosmetic surgery. Lilian Calles Barger, author of Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body, told WoW she is concerned about the spiritual dangers, too.

Barger argues that the church still divides body from soul, embracing the age-old Gnostic heresy that the body is something to transcend, not something to redeem. She said most Christians assume that God has nothing to say about the body, but “God is in the business of bringing our bodies into wholeness.” She calls cosmetic surgery “violence to the body” and says that women are sacrificing their bodies to the “false idols of beauty and consumer culture.”

Other Christians, like Kay Harms in Christian Women Today, argue that Christians cannot “arbitrarily decide what is extreme and what is acceptable” when it comes to cosmetic enhancement. Harms said, “While I still am not planning to go under the knife myself, I no longer feel decisively superior to those who do.”

Barger counters that the church should reconsider its definition of beauty. True beauty’s intangible virtue can point us to God, Barger said, but “we have reduced beauty to a specific, very narrow definition of material reality where there is no room for the imagination.” Instead of seeing ourselves in Solomon’s song to his Beloved, “Now we’re told that the Beloved looks like a model that’s five-eight and weighs 110 pounds. … We have lost our romantic imagination.”

It comes down to the Incarnation itself, Barger said: “Do we believe that God, the holy powerful God, came down and took on human flesh through the womb of a woman? … That has great significance for us as human beings for how we’re going to live in our bodies.”