Early Noughties teen mag ridiculousness

oh wow I'd completely forgotten about bath pearls!

Blimey, I remember bath pearls. We always gave them to each other, along with shaped soaps, for Christmas. ‘Course, if you had a bit more cash you’d be stocking up on Body Shop Dewberry or Fuzzy Peach stuff. Or Boots World Collection.

The problem with bath pearls was the little slimy pearl case that lurked at the bottom of the bath

I used to love More! Although it did make me think everyone but me was shagging all the time - age 13
I remember reading an article on why Christmas Day is great and one thing always stuck in my mind - Christmas Day is the only day of the year when you don't have to wash your hair because you won't bump into your crush

This thread has made me very nostalgic for the 90s. Going to the shopping centre for Smash Hits or More and calling into Boots for Sun In or maybe some of these cool bath pearls!

The mags back then were mainly based around getting a boyf, looking good and being 'cool' but they were fantastic. Despite the infamous 'position of the fortnight' in The Mizz, there was an kind of innocence about them. The readership was youngngirls who would giggle over them together, dreaming of having a boyfriend not various shenanigans. Now, when sadly you can see A LOT worse than Barbie and Ken set up in a sexual position in just a few clicks of a button, it makes me wish we still had that innocence.

I do remember one thing about teen mags ( Jackie , Blue Jeans ) .
I was maybe about 12 13 . The problem pages where a girl would write saying she had feelings for her friend , or fancied them .
The Agony aunt would say most girls go through this and it is just a phase .
I used to think I have never felt like that , odd .
Only now I can look back and think Section 28 .
Those poor girls seeking help and being told its a phase .

I still own and use a small purple mirror I got free with Shout magazine. I've been using it as my eyebrow plucking mirror for more than 20 years!

I didn't get and am very jealous of the poster who got a free velvet choker. My most memorable freebie was a sample of Bonne Bell 10-O-6 lotion, that bright orange stuff that smelled of pure alcohol and burned your skin.

Animatronic singing bear show at Flamingoland??

My God I want to go there now! I've missed out! 😆

Smash Hits I used to love because I would collect the songbooks out of them and learn all the words to my favourite songs! I kept those songbooks for years! Plus I was a huge Take That fan and they regularly had pictures or posters of them in there. Half my posters in my room came from Smash Hits!

One was a velvet choker which was quite the thing to go with our mood rings and Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick (held in place with Lipcote, which stung like fuck)...

Lipcote! I had entirely forgotten about that. It was clearly toxic, the second you applied it the skin on your lips crackled and chapped. I had an orange scented glitter lip gloss in a rollerball applicator that I got from one of those magazines and it was my favourite thing ever. My hair was constantly stuck to my lips for around 4 years, but that was the fashion in those days.

Yes to the seemingly mandatory holiday romances. Inspired (forced?) by these magazines I actually did have a small holiday romance when I was 13. He had hair in brown curtains, was from Hartlepool and I met him at the animatronic singing bear show at Flamingoland. Our younger siblings looked on in horror awe as we held hands around the arcade and kissed behind the campsite toilet block. I felt like I had truly arrived as a woman.

Ahh, the memories!

Buying J17 (on a Wednesday, IIRC) at the newsagents round the corner then us all crowding round to read the problem page on the school coach particularly sticks in my mind. As does the articles: things that were cool/not cool (was dead chuffed one week when there was a seaweed bubble bath from Boots deemed 'cool' and it was the very one I was using as I read J17 in the bath

Lots of the articles were how to attract boys (an awful lot of being mysterious, changing your look etc) and how to behave - I particularly remember an etiquette article saying that you shouldn't pull up your tights in public but you should remember to cross your legs slightly as you walked to a) make legs look thinner and b) give you an attractive wiggle as you walked.

Then there were the horoscopes, the quizzes ("I'm a B, which means I'm normal, rather than a psychopathic A or a square C!") and the freebies. One was a velvet choker which was quite the thing to go with our mood rings and Rimmel Black Cherry lipstick (held in place with Lipcote, which stung like fuck)...

Also used to read Mizz (which was full of arty black and white photos of men with their tops off, staring soulfully into the middle distance/out of a window), Smash Hits (which was bloody brilliant and I loved for its sarcasm even if 12 year old moralistic me was somewhat scandalised at a "How to be cool" article which suggested you should never let on that you only smoked Silk Cut and not Marlboros) and More (I don't remember anything about it other than position of the fortnight, involving a naked Barbie and Ken-style figurines doing something improbable).

Then I graduated onto Minx (which I bloody loved), New Woman and Marie Claire. Minx disappeared after a few years and the others just got rubbish and eventually disappeared too. Nowadays it's more Horse & Hound, Vogue or The Economist

@BashfulClam I can't say I ever did, or would have wanted, to go to my mum for sex advice tbh!

J17 was boss. It was the only one that had personality and I loved the artwork for the horoscopes.

To be honest they gave me most of my sex advice. My mums advice was ‘I was pure until
my wedding night and hope you will be too!’ She also said she hated it. I couldn’t go to her for advice and there was limited internet help. She was really good about periods etc though.

Brilliant thread 😂 So many memories!

So many memories on this thread!

There really were a lot of sex obsessed ones weren't there? I remember a copy of one magazine got passed around all the girls in the year group because there was a bit on a problem page talking about how to learn to give a blow job by practising in a banana.

I also remember getting a free tube of lime green glitter, kind of in the form of a lipstick but you were meant to use it all over your face/body. I spent one summer basically covered in lime green glitter - on my lips, cheeks, arms, eyelids.. it matched my lime green platform trainers perfectly, but I think I skipped green for my mascara and went with the ever popular blue instead 😂

I loved J-17, and Nick Fisher's replies to the problem pages: he had far more no-nonsense ideas. He'd write "every year, I receive requests for detailed information about how you're supposed to do French kissing. There is no right way." (However, lots of other articles would provide said detailed information.) He also advocated boys having feelings.

All those magazines showed girls and women appearing to wear trainers without socks, so I did so too. Nothing was said about trainer liners in those days - I thought they were for wimps.

I've love to have fried egg boobs now instead of a couple of E cup galia melons.

Randomly I've just read that Victoria Coren-Mitchell had a short story published in Just Seventeen - under a pseudonym.

(I say randomly because I have just realised she's married to David Mitchell and was having wtf-moment and looking her up.)

As well as the egg in hair mess I read that you should rub mashed banana in your hair. I have no idea what it was meant to do but it was incredibly difficult to get out even after repeatedly washing it.

Some friends sent in a fake problem to the problem page saying 'I used a Tesco bag instead of a condom with my boyfriend, could I be pregnant?' I'm not sure if it ever got published but none of them had done more than kissed a boy at that point, and probably not for several more years either.

If you have Instagram, there is an account that posts things from original 90s teen magazines, I love it: www.instagram.com/90steenmagazinearchiveuk/