13 Shameful Things We Did in the 90s
From hammer pants to water bras and all the awkward things in between
I’m not overly nostalgic about it, but I loved growing up in the 90s. I adored some things, like how the American emo bands somehow sounded whiny British. Or how on Fresh Prince, DJ Jazzy Jeff would get himself launched out of the mansion every day, like he was Uncle Phil’s own personal dayglo cannon.
But not everything was iconic, somethings were just flat-out perplexingly shameful. Like fake-tanning a Playboy imprint onto my hip to show off in my Christina-Aguilera-esque ultra-low-rise jeans.
In honor of my 1900s shame, here’s a list of some of the most embarrassing trends of the 90s that we..or at least I…participated in gleefully at the time:
1. Hair Crimping
Were these crimped, ondulating waves that made us look like Margot Robbie on a red carpet? No, we specifically went with tiny crimps that turned frizzy. We really wanted to look like we licked our fingers and then stuck them in the wall socket. Or that we tried to suck-start a 9V battery. That last one is true though, many of us did lick 9Vs. It’s why we know what batteries and electricity taste like.
I suppose I looked at hair crimping like, my chest might’ve been flat — but my hair certainly wasn’t going to be.
Don’t worry, the look was worse than you thought, because after we crimped frizzy shockwaves into our hair, we put it into awkward patches using approximately 12,000 teensy-tiny butterfly clips.
2. Tanning Booth Tans With Playboy Stickers
Ah, tanning salons. At first, we didn’t know they were frying us like a cancerous pickle, but even after we knew, many of us didn’t stop. We wanted that California glow, even though more of us ended up looking like oompaloompas.
If this wasn’t embarrassing enough, we’d place a tanning sticker to show our frying progress. It was generally on our upper pubic region, where its tan mark could be shown off by our low-rise jeans. The most popular one (and *coughcough-IdidThis-coughcough*) was a Playboy bunny.
3. Platform Shoes
We didn’t invent them, but we sure abused them. You know what’s more fun than walking in normal shoes? Walking on chunky stilts. Even the sneakers were platform, not that you could run well in them.
I think these shoes are the reasons we all have strong ankles now, since these summabitches weighed almost as much as a Buick. Albeit with so much damage caused by them, our ankles will still snap like a twig.
4. Water Bras
If you’re too young or too old to know what water bras are, they’re exactly what they sound like. They’re push-up bras, but instead of padding, they were full of water or gel. Like, a lot of water. Sigh, because nobody will notice that you went up 4 cup sizes since yesterday.
You spent the whole time wearing it, praying your titty doesn’t spring a leak. Well, that and nurturing the backache caused by having a small waterbed on your chest.
5. ‘Clear’ Bra Straps
I think we might’ve been collectively blind in the 90s. We loved things that were sparkly and yet somehow also pretended to be see-through, like jelly shoes and ‘clear’ bra straps. Were they actually transparent? No, not at all. Especially after time, as they got dirtier than Christina Aguilera.
Another reason they weren’t transparent was because the rubbery-plastic material dug into your shoulders, leaving very visible red marks.
Oh, and they smelled like a hockey equipment bag because you’d sweat more than a group of nuns at a cucumber farm.
6. Zigzag Headbands
We did weird hair things in the 90s. Much to our own peril, in terms of fashion and safety. Enter — Zigzag headbands. They were all the rage, despite the danger. They had literal teeth; they felt like a crocodile was trying to do your hair with its mouth.
The entire process of putting them on was dangerous. First, you put it around your neck like a collar, wherein it would poke and choke you like a medieval torture device. Then you’d bring it up over your face, where it would attempt to Captain Hook you by poking an eye out. Then, finally, taking it off would pull out approximately 13% of your hair.
7. Overplucked Eyebrows
We’d pluck our eyebrows so thin that you’d basically turn the two caterpillars sitting on your face into two lines thinner than a line of coke at the end of a party. I think some were going for a ‘heroin chic’ look, but it was more of a ‘cancer chic’ look.
If the thin plucking wasn’t enough, sometimes we’d re-draw them on with a hard eyebrow pencil, making you look like Helga from Hey Arnold!. They really made you commit to a mood for the day.
8. Body Glitter
Oh, the glitter. Shiny Twilight vampires eat your heart out, ‘90s kids were the originators of the ‘rolled in cheap glitter’ look. I had about 87 different types of glitter, including several in convenient ‘roll-on’ form. Although just opening a bag of glitter from Michaels, tossing it in the air, and walking through it perfume-style might have been more effective for the look we were trying to achieve.
It’s like we teenyboppers were all training to be strippers.
9. Popcorn Shirts
These shirts were so tiny that they may have been the precursor to Spanx. They looked like they were designed to fit a newborn baby, but somehow these miraculous shirts fit everybody you knew, in a Sisterhood of the Travelling Shirt fashion.
10. Jelly Sandals
Jelly sandals and shoes encapsulated everything we loved back then, ‘clear’ things that weren’t actually transparent, bubblegum colors, glitter, and discomfort.
Why have normal shoes when you can have ones that look like blueberry jam that a stripper rolled in?
Sometimes, if you bought the cheapos, these shoes melted in the heat.
11. Spikey Blonde-Tipped Hair
Why dye the whole head blonde when you could do just the tips and have black hair underneath? Because that would’ve been more sensical, and there wasn’t a lot of sense in the 90s. So instead, guys would play ‘just the tips’ when dyeing their hair blonde.
If that look wasn’t bad enough, then they’d spike them with L. A. Looks Extreme Sport Ultra Hold Hair Gel. We liked everything to be called ‘extreme’ back then. But the only thing ‘extreme’ about this was that the guys looked like they were all trying to be Gohan from Dragon Ball Z.
12. Chunky Hair Highlights
Stop laughing ladies, the boys might’ve been Gohan, but don’t forget that we crimped our hair. Oh, and we got chunky highlights, so you’d have patches of blonde like you just rolled around in hair dye, then fell asleep. We’d then cut it into the Rachel from Friends haircut. So many of us had this same style that we looked like poorly-dyed Stepford wives.
Embarassingly, this is a haircut that I still sport to this day, albeit a toned-down version and natural highlights, because, let’s face it — those chunky highlights weren’t fooling anybody.
13. Hammer Pants
MC Hammer might’ve rocked these pants with his iconic dance moves, but the rest of us really couldn’t pull them off. Even the less crotch-baggy parachute pants were a mortal sin to fashion when combined with Fresh Prince dayglo.
But on the bright side, you could crap your pants, and nobody would visually notice.
I don’t know what’s worse, the hammer pants, or that period of time where we wore our pants backwards while we were jumping around to Kriss Kross.
Despite all of the above, I miss the 90s sometimes; maybe they weren’t the most fashion-forward, but they were good times. On the bright side, we didn’t have smartphones then, so there isn’t as much photographic evidence of our fashion atrocities as there would be now.
By the way, if you thought JNCO jeans were going to be on this list, I still think those are cool. So do young kids now; JNCO has boomeranged back into fashion.
I love that you could fit your Discman in the gigantic pockets. And just when we thought those raver jean legs couldn’t get any wider, they’d increase them to a size that we could sneak our younger sibling into the rave in them.
I also liked some of the cringey stuff, like hypercolor t-shirts. I still think those are tubular.
Maybe not everything from the 90s was embarrassing, just about 90% of it.
Join Robin’s Hood…
Writing is my only income. Bad life decisions aside, I’d love for you to become a paid supporter of Robin’s Hood and join our band of merry mofos. We’d be happy to have you at any level that’s comfortable…
$1 per month ($10/year) ~ $2 per month ~ $3 per month ~ $4 per month ~ $5 per month
Don’t have any money? Don’t worry, me neither, and I still love you.
"Cancerous Pickle" would be a great band name.
I wore huge legged jeans back in the ‘70s. I kept getting them twisted around my legs and actually fell off my platform shoes, spraining both ankles. It was at that point I decided that tall shoes were dangerous to my extremities, and rarely wore heels after that.