Things Only Emos Will Understand Things Only Emos Will Find Funny
Snake Bite Piercings
It's no secret that emo kids loved their piercings, and the weirder the better! There were always a ton of kids who had somehow managed to hoodwink their parents into letting them get snake bites or surface piercings. "Ugh, your mom is like SO cool about stuff like that…" The jokes probably on them, because a septum piercing can heal over but you're always going to have little dots all over your face as signs of your former emo alter-ego.
Dyed Hair
To the untrained eye, this might look like any girl nowadays with unicorn colored hair, but emo kids will remember the trials and tribulations they went through to achieve a look like this. Hair salons would hands down refuse to dye their hair these crazy colors, so emo kids took to bathrooms everywhere to do it themselves! Note the jagged edges of the cut too which are definitely the product of taking a pair of mom's sewing scissors to the ends!
Checkered Vans
A brand that totally profited from the emo trend was Vans. These checkered skate shoes were imprinted in the minds of all emo teenagers who would beg their parents to buy them a pair until they gave in. The problem was that they didn't want the shoes to look new. As soon as they came out the box these Vans would be taken for a walk in a muddy field, before using highlighters to color in the squares. "Thanks, Mom, I love them!"
Emo Guy Style
Emo guys had it pretty good with the style back then in the early 2000s. Heavy eyeliner was highly recommended, as was looking as though you hadn't showered (and most of them hadn't!). Equally, holes in t-shirts were acceptable and even encouraged. Harder to achieve was the general look of not caring about anything. This was particularly hard for posers, who had to quash their natural pep and cheeriness in order to bag themselves their perfect emo princess girlfriend.
Everything Jack Skellington
If there's one thing emo misfits loved more than anything, it was The Nightmare Before Christmas. Sure, it was basically a musical, but spOoOoOky which made it cool, ok? And what better protagonist than Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King himself. Emos wanted him on schoolbags, sneakers, sweatbands, t-shirts, and just about anything else we could trick our parents into forking out for. Even emo kids who hadn't seen the movie wanted the merch, if only to freak out their grandma!
Deep, Dark, And Mysterious
Before face-tuning apps and Instagram filters, emo kids were tricking out their photos with rudimentary versions of Adobe Photoshop, or even Microsoft Paint in some cases! One classic edit was the black and white photo with pops of color. So edgy! This says I have a bit of brightness in me but I'm mainly deep, dark, and mysterious. This girl has perfected the sideways glance away from the camera, although it could just be the weight of all that mascara!
Drawings On DeviantArt
Emo kids were so creative. If they weren't writing poetry on LiveJournal they were sketching their inner nightmares on their secret DeviantArt account. The artworks of this time were heavily styled after The Nightmare Before Christmas and were almost all in the most revered of emo colors: black and red. This was all about creepy dolls, voodoo magic, skulls, scary princesses, and weird animals. Bonus points if you scrawled My Chemical Romance lyrics along the bottom in black marker.
Loitering By The Mall
This photo could be just about any emo guy the girls all had a crush on in 2004. Bangs all over his eyes, very skinny jeans, book of hand-written poetry in his back pocket, and a Motorola flip phone (he's definitely texting your girl). This particularly mopey brand of emo kid could always be found loitering outside the mall hoping to be noticed. Oh you like the same band that's on his shirt? He doesn't like them anymore since you've said that. Poser.
Hidden Lip Tattoo
These insane lip tattoos were only for the brave, and apparently extremely painful to have done! Emo kids would all band together to head to the back-street tattoo shop just to watch some hairy biker dude giving out underage tattoos. Mom and Dad would never find out about this one…until you pulled your front lip down in the middle of a blazing argument to show them what you'd done. "I can do what I want, OK, MOM! I'm 17!"
Fall Out Boy
Fall Out Boy, the holy grail of emo bands, were the scream along car stereo soundtrack of a whole generation of emos. No evening spent with the emo crew in the park was complete without shouting in unison "We're going DOWN DOWN in an earlier round!" Pete Wentz was the guy all the girls crushed on, who used to cut photos of him out of magazines and stick them inside their schoolbooks with hearts all around. That guyliner was dreamy!
Hating Ashlee Simpson
If there's one thing that the emo kids hated, it was normies who pretended they were emo. Posers! Ashlee Simpson bore the brunt of adolescent anger for quite a few years when she reinvented herself with dyed brown hair and pulled-up socks. Who did she think she was? We knew she was just a Jessica Simpson trained to pretend otherwise! Emo kids everywhere giggled with glee during her lip-syncing fiasco on Saturday Night Live. There's no WAY they could ever get behind Ashlee.
Ashlee And Pete Forever
Well, the emo world did a full 180 when Ashlee Simpson started dating Pete Wentz! The singer, previously written off as a poser, suddenly became everyone's idol as one-half of the emo generation's power couple. Girls wanted to look like Ashlee, guys wanted Pete's swagger, and they spawned a nation of clones who attempted to pull off their looks. Emo kids went bananas when they saw the wedding photos, featuring the whole Fall Out Boy gang dressed in suits.
I'll Stop Wearing Black
This photo illustrates two of the hottest trends of emo kids back in the day: the classic Fall Out Boy lyric 'I'll stop wearing black when they make a darker color', which would be scrawled on every surface they could get their hands on, and the proliferation of terrible art on the internet. Sticking to purple and black, the second most emo color combination, kids would create truly disastrous typographical car crashes to share with their besties on Myspace.
Raccoon Eyeliner
No emo girl's look was complete without using an entire eyeliner stick in one application to create the famous raccoon eyes. It would never be totally removed before bed, so you'd always be layering on the base from days previously! This was perfect for any teenage emo girl who was trying to reinvent herself. Hey, if Taylor Momsen could go from cutesy child star to rocking frontwoman then why couldn't you?!
Back-Breaking Photo Angles
Every emo who had Myspace (so, all of them) was obsessed with this crazy, back-breaking photo angle. The idea was to look like you had a teeny tiny head with huge hair, and for your legs to look skinny and spindly in comparison. People get a bad wrap these days for poor posture, which is usually attributed to too many hours on the computer. We'd argue the case that it is THIS exact post that spawned a generation of hunching emos!
Painstaking Planning
If you and your girlfriend weren't taking photos like this, were you even an emo couple?! These photos, always taken from above with a dodgy handheld digital camera, involved a lot of painstaking planning. You had to coordinate your eyeshadow, make sure those matching piercings you got were on show, and get those bangs flipped just in the right way. And then the poses. Oh the poses. It's a dead cert that this couple spent at least 45 minutes getting the perfect shot!
Emo Accessories
No emo look was complete without a load of accessories just to overload the already crowded aesthetic. The vibe was cutesy with a bit of grit, so think bows and colored alice bands paired with studded cuffs. The crowning glory was the emo sweatband. These were to be worn every day without fail, hopefully stamped with a band logo or sarcastic message, and certainly nothing to do with sports. In fact, could emo sweatbands have been the first athleisure clothing? Mind blown.
Warped Tour
Ah, Warped Tour. All the alternative kids wanted to go there, and the emo gang was no exception. Where else could you find the All American Rejects, The Used and Paramore in the same place? Plus it was soooo anti-establishment. Wrong! Warped Tour pretty much wrote the book on how to monetize sponsorship for music festivals, and most big events are still copying their methodology today. Just don't mention it to the emos – they were there before it was corporate anyways.
Katy Perry At The Warped Tour
One of the biggest gripes from Warped Tour attendees was the inclusion of a very young Katy Perry as a performed. That pop star totally didn't belong up there with the emo gods that all the kids were there to see. Times have moved on, and its almost a guarantee that those same emo kids who dissed on Katy Perry for encroaching on their scene are now lining up to see her sold-out stadium tour. Turns out Katy knew how to rock it with the best!
Emo Kid Poses
Let's start with the easiest of emo kid poses: the sideways glance while bent over knees. If we study this image we can see this girl has the perfect combination of sweeping bleached hair and piercings with lashes of eyeliner. First, bend from the waist with a straight back and lean your shoulders forward in order to make your legs look tiny compared to your head. The pose is completed by holding your hands awkwardly, and voila! You're an early 2000s emo!
Gravity Defying Hairdos
After all of the teasing, backcombing, bleaching, and dyeing, an emo haircut had to be fixed just right. Hairspray sales must have gone through the roof as emo kids scrambled to create the perfect gravity-defying hairdo. Emo guys were just as guilty as emo girls for jumping on the hairspray bandwagon, and could often be found with a small spray hidden in their book bags. We see you, guys! And while you're there, can we borrow your hairspray?
Typewriter Poets
How on earth could we forget Dashboard Confessional?! Their song Stolen broke a thousand emo hearts with its emotional line 'I watch you spin around in your highest heels, you are the best one, of the best ones.' Every emo girl wanted a guy to sing that to her, and many of them were probably sitting at home typing the line out on a typewriter as shown above. Hipsters may think they own out-of-date formats, but emos did them better!
Rubber Band Bracelets
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Once the sweatband thing had gotten kind of old, the emo kids moved on to a new trend: rubber band bracelets. This was a great moneymaker for whoever was that year's musical darlings, who'd sell them for $10 a pop at their shows. You'd think that these would be more hygienic than sweatbands, but the smell was very much the same, if not worse. If you've ever smelled the peculiar scent of a teenage emo boy you know what we mean!
The Word RAWR
RAWR is the official word of emo kids and scene kids alike, although nobody knows how to pronounce it properly because it was always written, usually in a post on Myspace or as part of our MSN screenname. You'd think that these would be more hygienic than sweatbands, but the smell was very much the same, if not worse. If you've ever smelled the peculiar scent of a teenage emo boy you know what we mean!
Studded Belts
Multiple studded belts were a key accessory for emo kids. One was pathetic, but two, three, or four at a time was perfect. Just don't let them serve any functional purpose like holding up your jeans! The punks were probably pretty annoyed when the emo kids stole this from their culture. However, the emos mostly wore this shopping mall rip-off versions with the sharp edges chiseled down. They didn't want their piercing to get caught when dancing in the pit!
Shopping At Hot Topic
Hot Topic was the only place emo kids would let their moms take them to when they dragged them to the mall. It had everything a well-dressed scene kid could need, including those horrific parachute trousers which, arguably, nobody needed. High school emo kids would rush to hand in their resumés whenever Hot Topic was hiring for weekend shifts just to try and get their hands on a bit of that sweet staff discount, and choose their outfits before anyone else.
Tom From Myspace
The face that launched a thousand emo kids, Tom was the greeter of Myspace and was automatically one of your friends when you signed up to the site. Emo kids liked to laugh at his goofy profile photo, yet still kept him as a friend. Some emos went as far as to put Tom in their Top 8 friends, although this was probably their incredible wit and sarcastic humor shining through. Who knew they could be so funny?
Shows At Dive Bars
Every emo kid seemed to follow the same rule when it came to attending shows. The venue had to be booked over capacity, the walls had to be dripping with sweat, and it had to stink like the worst dive bar you've ever smelled. The bands could be emo, screamo, or even hardcore, just so long as you'd heard of them first. If too many people knew the words to all the songs then you were officially over them. Sellouts!
HTML On Myspace
Let's give credit where credit is due, Myspace gave something back to emo kids in the form of their first experiences coding HTML. The profile formats were pretty restrictive, so emo kids use their ingenuity to create their own covers and styles. Some emos even created templates for others to use, good for them! The key components were sad, wistful lyrics dotted all over the place, a song playing from an obscure Californian band, and a username like xdiam0nd_3y3zx.
All-American Rejects
Just four chords on an electric organ. That's all it takes to suss out who in your group was a former emo kid. When you see them mouthing 'Days swiftly come and go, I'm dreaming of herrrrr,' you've got them! The video for "Swing Swing" was all over MTV and the Kerrang! music channel, with sultry singer Tyler Ritter complete with bangs standing in the perfect pigeon-toed emo singer position. To be fair, this song is still a bop.
Animal Print Hair
Some ex-emo kid somewhere is fuming that this leopard print hair look is included in this article because technically it was a scene kid thing. But emo kids and scene kids were basically the exact same thing, even if they wouldn't admit it! This look was designed purely to irritate high school principals everywhere, because even if you told an emo kid to dye over the look you'd still be able to see the leopard print through. Dedication to the cause!
Emo Bedroom Goals
Much to their parents' dismay, emo kids were pretty crafty and could spend hours upon hours cutting out photos from music magazines to plaster all over their walls. This was, of course, mainly just to show off to their emo friends when they came around. Every three or four months the posters would be changed for the next hottest band that nobody had heard of. Moms all around the country are still finding bits of sticky tape in unusual corners today!
Hayley Williams Worship
If Pete Wentz was the king of emo, then Hayley Williams from Paramore was the queen. Their song "Misery Business" hitting the charts coincided with sales of orange hair dye going through the roof. Wonder why? Hayley was actually a pretty good role model. She was smart, sassy, and did things her own way despite only being 17 when the band got big. Paramore tickets were like gold dust, and any emo that go to see them was highly revered!
Gauge Piercings
Gauge piercings were the ultimate diss from any emo kid to their parents, or to the wider society in general. These involved stretching your piercing with a series of larger and larger pieces of jewelry until you could see through the hole. Many emo kids referred to these as 'flesh tunnels' which, quite frankly, gives us the creeps. There was always one kid who had decided to stretch too quickly and ended up in the doctor's office. It's cringey just to think of it!
Emo Moodboards
Emo kids were notoriously moody and a bit of mood boarding and collaging really got them going! Magazine cutouts would be arranged all over their bedroom floor and then made into makeshift book covers for school books or, if they were really feeling creative, découpage for furniture in their rooms. In a well-decorated bedroom, an emo kid could fall asleep dreaming of their wedding to Gerard Way or Hayley Williams while being watched over by the singer of their heart's desire.
post_page_title]The Smell of Burning Hair[/post_page_title]
At this point in the article, we think it's safe to say that that emo kids were all about the hair, specifically straight hair. That's why the smell of burning hair is just a scent that emo kids got used to at a certain point from constantly straightening their hair. Of course, most kids were using a Conair straightener because they couldn't afford to buy a Chi and mommy dearest certainly wasn't going to buy one for a 15-year-old that's "just going through a phase."
Looking This Good Comes With a Price
Right, so — you've finished straightening your hair but you still have one more thing to do in order to complete the whole look. Just perfectly arrange your bangs to the point that you can only see out of one eye. We think it goes without saying that looking this good, people, obviously comes with a price. The price, in this case, is your depth perception but at least that hour you spent doing your hair isn't going to waste.
Only Listening to These Kinds of Bands
We've already mentioned Fall Out Boy but can we just talk about the fact that emo teens loved listening to any band in which the lead singer had an insufferably whiny voice? Apparently that kind of sound was cool to listen to back in the day but now, it's pretty much intolerable. Between Panic! At the Disco's Brendon Urie and My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way, it's not hard to understand why these 2000s emo kids looked so glum all the time.
Painting Your Nails Black
In order to be considered an emo kid, you had to look the part. This meant the straightened hair, the black eyeliner, the checkered vans, the spiked belt, the piercings, and of course — the black nail polish. Whether you bit your nails or not, so many emo kids had a shade of black painted on their nails. Honestly, it didn't even matter if the polish was chipped so long as the color itself was the darkest shade of black.
MTV vs. Fuse
Originally dedicated to music, Fuse is a television channel that was first launched in 1994 and was originally dedicated to music. If you're a former emo kid, chances are you used to spend hours watching Fuse because you thought MTV started selling out. Sure — MTV 2 might have played decent music here and there but reality shows were the main focus of the channel. Of course, whether you'd like to admit it or not, you somehow found yourself watching episodes of The Real World and My Super Sweet 16.
Jelly Bracelets
Gel or jelly bracelets, wristbands made of silicone, were all the craze back in the day. If we're being honest, all the cool kids had them. Back in the '80s, almost every young person wore jelly bracelets and although they lost popularity at a certain point, these trendy accessories made a comeback in the early 2000s. At this point, though, they became the subject of a widespread urban legend. Still, despite what parents had to say about the trend, kids in the early 2000s continued to stack their jelly bracelets way up their arm.
Fingerless Gloves
Let's be real — most of this fashion doesn't totally make sense nowadays but at some point in our lives, we thought we looked awesome and we sort of did, for the time. In any event, striped patterns were a quintessential statement to this beloved style. Of course, striped and fingerless gloves were a whole different story. Not only did they keep our palms warm and toasty but they also kept us looking "like whoa," as us emo kids used to say.
Personalizing Your Backpack
Kids who grew up in the early 2000s know all about personalizing their backpack. That was just the thing to do in middle school. After all, why would you want your Jansport backpack to look exactly like Jenny's from fifth period? That's why kids had to get creative. They usually used Bic's Wite-Out correction fluid to write what they wanted on their bags. To really make it their own, though, they added different pins and ironed on patches of their favorite bands, doodles, and more.
Hoodies
Hoodies were a staple in emo fashion. But, right now we're not just talking about any hoodies. Former emo kids had the best kind of hoodies, with holes ripped into the cuffs for their thumbs to go through — ya know, for all the texting they were doing on that Razr flip phone of theirs. In any case, the sweatshirt was preferably black or dark-hued because colors were apparently scary. They could pull that hood up right over their head, and the rest of the world would disappear.
Mismatched Shoes & Socks
Okay, so we still may not entirely match our socks but it's really because we're trying to make a fashion statement. It's more because we're now old and lazy. Still, why did we ever think that mismatched shoes were ever a good idea? Wearing two different Converse was the easiest way to represent just how random you were, which we guess was a cool thing to be. In any event, we're just glad that these fashion choices are officially behind us.
Graffitied Converse
Second only to the checkered Vans, Converse shoes were the love of emo kids all over the world. It felt so smooth scribbling in pen all over that little rubber piece on the end. As with the Vans, these were bought brand new and then graffitied immediately. Bonus points were given for managing to write an entire song out in this tiny space so that your crush had to get up close and personal to try to read the lyrics.
AIM Away Messages
Both MSN and AIM had a variety of ways for emo kids to express their poetic ramblings. Careful traps were laid to choose the right lyrics or quotes to attract the attention of that special someone. And if the plan didn't work and your crush didn't send you a message? Why you'd just sign out and then in again! This was also the time when all the special keyboard characters they could think of would come out ~*^iN FuLl f0Rc3*^~ </3.
Swallow Tattoos
There aren't many tattoos that epitomize the early 2000s emo experience quite like the swallow tattoo. Despite being an old sailor style, emo kids adopted this as their own signifier, although there always had to be two. The weird thing about this tattoo was that emos always thought they were totally original for getting it. As evidenced above, it was one of the most popular styles ever, and couples would even hook-up and discover they had the same ink. Must have been fate!
Should I Reconfigure My Top 8?
Nowadays, everyone walks around with phones that notify them every 2 seconds when someone likes their photo. Emo kids didn't have this luxury, but they had something better. The feeling of anticipation of arriving home from school could only be trumped by logging into Myspace and being greeted with this screen. New messages! Which guy from school are the girls trashing now? New friend requests! Should I reconfigure my Top 8? Invitation to a My Chemical Romance listening party? Say no more!
Kerrang! Magazine
All emo kids loved music magazines, but the true alternative music fans knew that the only way to stay ahead of the trend was to try and get hold of a copy of UK magazine Kerrang! If it meant importing it, then so be it. Emo kids were willing to pay top dollar just to learn about new trends before anyone else did, learn about the latest feuds between their favorite musicians, and discover which hair color to copy next.
Source: https://admin.thefashionball.com/trends/things-former-emo-kids-will-understand-yh/
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