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The mushroom haircut every boy got in the early 90s, sometimes literally under a bowl at the kitchen table, and its cooler cousin, the middle-parted version Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Nick Carter wore on every magazine cover. One decade, two haircuts, the same school photo.
Thick, bleached stripes in stark contrast against your natural color — the opposite of subtle. Chunky highlights ruled the late '90s and early 2000s, applied at sleepovers with box dye and a plastic cap, and every 2003 yearbook photo proves it.
Short hair gelled into stiff spikes with the tips bleached pale blond — the signature boy-band-era men's look. If a guy on TRL had it, so did half the boys at your school.
The screaming-yellow tube in the drugstore hair aisle that promised — and delivered — spikes that could survive a school day, gym class, and a thunderstorm. Schwarzkopf's göt2b Glued was industrial adhesive masquerading as styling product, and every spiked, flipped, faux-hawked head of the 2000s knew it on sight.
A tight spiral of colored thread wound down a few strands of hair, made at a sleepover or bought at a beach-town stand. We couldn't find who started it, but by 1998 Klutz had published a whole how-to kit for it.
The drugstore spray-in lightener that promised a sun-kissed, surfer blonde: spritz it on, sit in the sun or run the blow-dryer, and wait. For '90s teens who weren't allowed to dye their hair it was the loophole, and plenty of heads came out the orange, brassy color hairstylists warn about.