Being a Noughties teen was the worst, but also the best
One of my schoolfriends is currently clearing out her childhood bedroom and has been sharing some absolute gems from our teenage years to the Whatsapp group.
There’s the photos of us all wearing matching red waterproofs and hiking boots for the Duke of Edinburgh award, and others of nights out in Cardiff where we have tadpole eyebrows, side fringes and ghd curls that make us look like poodles. Not for the first time, I’m thanking my lucky stars not to have grown up in the age of social media, when every photo would end up emblazoned across the internet for everyone to see. Also, that I grew up in a time when I was not expected to look like a 25-year-old woman at 15, unlike the teens of today.
My own Instagram feed was recently awash with the ‘I met my younger self for coffee’ trend, where a largely millennial crowd imagined the conversations they’d have with their former selves over a latte. Despite making me cringe to my core, reading them is sort of fascinating, because nearly everyone describes their 18- or 19-year-old self as being in a place of great turmoil and trauma, only to emerge as a sassy, wise butterfly in their thirties.
Indeed there seems to be a generally held belief that being a teen in the Noughties was terrible, particularly for girls, because of the toxic diet culture, magazines drawing circles round celebrities’ cellulite and #MeToo being a million miles away. Much of which is true. I remember only too well loads of my friends being on the Special K diet in secondary school, or the way all the Spice Girls – my one-time icons – got loads of attention when they suddenly shrunk to size 4. Far from being taught about consent as teenage girls, we were trained to politely ignore an unwanted flash or grope. I was about 12 when I started watching TV shows like What Not To Wear and 10 Years Younger, which rather than preaching self-love, taught me that if you have a body part you don’t like you simply must cover it up or cut it off. The treatment of gay people at that time was absolutely appalling (as anyone whose watched the recent Sky documentary on Boyzone will attest) – in fact when I was at school, ‘gay’ was the go-to word for anything a bit crap.
Yes, it had major problems. And yet, and yet… I’m also weirdly grateful to have come of age at that time. Mainly because, as mentioned, the insidious dominance of social media hadn’t begun. Of course we all worried about not being pretty enough, as teenage girls have done for millennia, but we weren’t carrying around devices full of photos of women much prettier than us, which convinced us of the need for 45-minute make-up routines and expensive skincare products. Everyone at my school just spent a fiver on Maybelline Dream Matte Mousse Foundation (which was basically orange paint), daubed that on and hoped for the best.
I can see that social media has allowed certain individuals who feel like outliers to find their tribes. But it’s also flattened out the teenage fashion and beauty aesthetic into one dominant mainstream, just like it’s done for music, home décor and many other things. One of the gloriously silly things about being a teen in the Noughties was repping your team - in my hometown this was moshers and townies, but I’m sure every UK city had some variation of teen tribal warfare. Townies had drawstring Nike bags, lots of hair gel and were in the top set for P.E. Moshers were better at music, wore huge jeans and couldn’t catch a netball to save their lives. Guess which group I was in? Again, I’m very glad there’s no online evidence of all this, but looking back I can see that those exaggerated looks were as far from the ‘beige girl’ aesthetic as it is possible to be, and I’m glad of it.
What about the toxic media and TV back then? Yes, it existed, but on the counter side I present Noughties teen magazines. Pre-internet, magazines were everything. I knew exactly what day of the month J17 was going to hit the shelves and would happily skip round to the newsagents to buy a copy. Along with publications like Sugar and Bliss, I remember it being quite sweet and supportive, and full of advice columns telling you to put toothpaste on your zits, which strikes me as a much more achievable than the Sephora tween boom of 2025.
Not everything was so sweet and innocent. Teen drinking, for example, was way better (or worse, depending on your viewpoint) in the Noughties. Back in those days fake IDs actually worked, although my friends and I were all convinced that all you needed was a black blazer – we’re businesswomen! – to get served anywhere. It was the age of the alcopop, when you could unashamedly drink two Smirnoff Ice and then roll around in your mates back garden laughing all night. Unlike today’s teens, we definitely did not care about the health benefits of teetotalism, gym routines or clean eating (yes we had diets, but they involved restricting yourself to five flakes of sugary cereal a day, not medjool dates and manuka honey). Many of my funniest nights out happened while I was in sixth form, when 18 of us would regularly bundle into a six-person taxi and hit the streets of Cardiff in our matching blazers. And again – no digital photographic evidence.
What else was great about being a Noughties teen?
The freedom. None of us were air-tagged, and parents then were generally less neurotic about keeping tabs on their children.
The music. I laugh in the face of teens discovering Arctic Monkeys now. They grew up with us! And nights out to the soundtrack of Beyonce, Britney and Black Eyed Peas were next level.
The films. From Bridget Jones’s Diary to Moulin Rouge, 10 Things I Hate About You to Love Actually, we were spoilt. Being a teenage girl in the golden age of the rom-com, it was no surprise we spent two hours deliberating over what to watch in Blockbusters every Saturday.
The shops. Topshop in its heyday - the best place on earth.
The phone calls. No Whatsapp meant dialling up your friend’s landline, asking their dad if you could speak to them, and then having two-hour phone calls sitting on the landing of your house, even though you’d just spent eight hours talking continuously in school.
It’s my birthday tomorrow, which means I’m once again surprised at the grand old age I appear to have reached. But I wouldn’t swap it, because if I wasn’t the age I am now I’d have missed out on my naughty Noughties teens.
And as for being a kid in the Nineties? Don’t even get me started…
N.B. Having written this newsletter, I’ve just noticed has written something in a similar, though much more eloquent vein. Do read it here!
The music!!! My music taste is so eclectic from Brit Pop Gems, garage, dnb and the Spice Girls and S Club! And also all the magazines! They were a bible for me growing up! Sad girls don’t have that now.
Hit by a tsunami of nostalgia with this! Mentioning the actual DAY the mags hit the shelves was a core memory unlocked. That feeling of seeing the new cover on the shelves. I also remember buying Sugar and Bliss for the first time and my parents having to go through and rip out all the agony aunt pages, as I was too young to read them 😂 this was at the end of my Mizz mag phase, if memory serves me right.
Not to mention MORE Mag - position of the week!
The blazers too 😂😩 we used to send the tallest of our group to buy vodka in Asda, complete with her glasses, whilst carefully studying an insurance leaflet at the tills. Always reminds me of the scene in the Inbetweeners.
Gah - I’m sure every generation reflects on their pre-adolescent phase with rose tinted glasses but I agree, us millennials (and I’d argue Gen X due to the music scenes they were lucky enough to witness) had it pretty good.