What We Lost When Y2K Teen Magazines Disappeared

I learned how to curl my hair from a magazine. Or, at least, I tried.

In hindsight, the project was doomed from the start. The editorial spread in YM magazine included only an “After” photo and just 100 words of quick copy. The model in the pictures was glowing, having apparently achieved a full head of thick spiral curls ahead of her 7am homeroom class. She had not burned the sides of her face. Smiling up from the glossy, heavily perfumed pages of the magazines, she smiled like the apotheosis of womanhood that she was.

Today, social media's quick, algorithmic feeds have transformed the world of beauty. My hair and makeup hacks are comprehensive and tailored to me. Good advice is more accessible, and the quality is better. But amidst the immediate but fragmented swirl of tutorials and product reviews, I find myself nostalgic for the warmth and connection of those former teen bibles: YM, CosmoGirl, Seventeen, and Sassy.

Teen magazines, the younger, playful versions of women’s lifestyle magazines, rose to prominence in the 80s and had their heyday in the 90s and early 00s. What you couldn’t learn from your mom or an older sister, you could probably find on the magazine stand.

The editorial voice was so relatable that today, it seems almost folksy. There were thoughtful, actionable articles. Quizzes to help you decide whether to drop your toxic friend, with a key at the end for tabulating your results. Drug store product roundups. Makeovers and “Got Milk?” ads. Investigative reporting on birth control or eating disorders because, at their best, teen magazines treated young women and their concerns seriously.

Of course, there was lots of filler, too. Questionable beauty tips from celebrities. Kafka-esque hair tutorials Reader-submitted embarrassing stories, which centred so often on period blood that I grew up believing adulthood was just a series of brief moments between mortifying menstrual ordeals.

And they were, of course, incredibly uniform. By the early 00s, the more progressive magazines had begun to incorporate more diversity but, in truth, teen magazines protected and enshrined one narrow vision of beauty and, thus, power. And that vision was undeniably white, thin, and cisnormative. “That’s how you can know for sure that beauty is power,” writes former beauty editor Sable Yong in her essay collection Die Hot With a Vengence: Essays on Vanity. “No one bothers to gatekeep things that aren’t.”

Perhaps that’s why I saved those magazines in towering stacks. They felt like a lifeline to my fully achieved womanhood.

Here’s the truth: I have way better hair now that TikTok and YouTube have democratized beauty. Last month, I watched a 45-minute video on the art of hair rollers. I watched the video on my phone at the bathroom sink, and when I released my hair, it was silky and full of volume. These days, even I know how to use loose powder. My Instagram feed is full of video tutorials to recreate makeup looks from Sex and the City or Gilmore Girls. This is the content I want. I keep clicking on it so I get more.

There is no doubt that platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok have improved the accessibility and quality of beauty advice. Creators are more diverse, which allows beauty to be more diverse. Influencers are more responsive to hyperspeed microtrends and often have niche expertise. The algorithm rewards content that is easy to watch and understand.

Younger generations, those not reared on the print magazine hair tutorial, have led the charge. Fewer than 20% of teens report reading a book, magazine, or newspaper daily. Instead, the language of digital media has come to shape our lives, which inevitably includes our beauty lives.

I’m not here with a moral panic about kids who don’t read print. Beauty went digital because it’s better suited, in almost every way, to the way we live now.

Social media has nudged us towards performance. The more we’re on camera — the more we are the main character — the more we expect to see ourselves as we’ve come to see the leads in the movies. That is, with better hair, better teeth, and better skin. We are our own hair and makeup team, even as we’re also responsible for the lighting, the writing, and staging.

But we did lose something when YM shuttered in 2004 and CosmoGirl folded in 2008. Teen Vogue went entirely online in 2017. Seventeen followed in 2020. Once shared cultural touchstones, these outlets diminished as the attention of beauty consumers splintered across the Internet.

“When feeds are algorithmic, they appear differently to different people: It’s impossible to know what someone else is seeing at a given time, and thus harder to feel a sense of community with others online, the sense of collectivity you might feel when watching a movie in a theatre or sitting down for a prescheduled cable TV show,” observed Kyle Chayka in his 2024 book Filterworld.

Beauty editors were once the arbiters of taste but their function has been replaced by the direction of algorithms, which elevate based purely on the engagement metrics. Are other people watching and clicking? Are you watching and clicking? Show more of that!

“Under algorithmic feeds, the popular becomes more popular, and the obscure becomes even less visible,” says Chayka.

All this means I see more of the Carrie Bradshaw beauty tutorials I crave. After all, she was a viral hit this year; the early 2000s icon was low-hanging fruit for hungry content creators. 

My makeup has never been better.

And yet, more and more, I find myself longing for a specific, humanizing ineptness.

My teenhood was marked by beauty and cluelessness. My hair was kind of bad. I used makeup more for the ritual of application than the effects because there was no need to be perma-camera-ready. I perceived my life from within myself first. There was not yet an ever-present anxiety that I was somehow living less fully that way.

My bespoke social feeds often serve me videos of Millennial content creators revisiting their chaotic Y2K style choices. Flat-ironed hair. Layered tank tops. Chunky highlights. On the surface, the joke is on the absurd cyclical movements of style. Our younger selves are easy targets against the polished backdrop of our social feeds. We’ve forgotten how small our worlds felt.

This kind of substanceless content is viral bait. It does little more than name a once-shared experience. Of course, lots of people shared the same experiences when the culture was mediated by select, centralized media outlets. We’ve lost all sense of monoculture.

The aesthetics of the 2000s are inseparable from the glossy print magazines that delivered them to us. “The medium is the message,” said media theorist Marshall McLuhan. This is to say that the tactile, visual, and olfactory qualities of print magazines — the glossy pages, the full-colour ads, the embedded perfume samples — are key to understanding the era’s aesthetic. They were the aesthetic.

With Seventeen, aspiration arrived in the mailbox as a polished, unified vision, sealed with the scent of a Calvin Klein sample. On TikTok, they’re fragmented, endlessly adaptive, and shaped as much by the viewer as by the creator. Perhaps that’s the greatest irony: as beauty advice has become more democratic and accessible, it has also become more solitary. Where magazines once invited readers into a shared cultural moment, today’s digital media offers infinite individual experiences.

But when we long for the colours and textures of that era, perhaps we’re also longing for the less performed and less polished ways that we embodied them. We’re nostalgic for a more communal and lived-in experience.

I didn’t perfect my curls, but my instinct tells me there was something profound in the fumbling. When beauty arrived in small, monthly doses, it was a revelation. Now, as I scroll through Instagram's excesses, rarely pausing, I wonder if I value it less.