The Cosmo-Era Advice We Never Thought To Question

Raise your hand if you still think about "day to night" when it comes to picking outfits.

I mean, has that Cosmo-era advice ever even come in handy?

I recently came across this video of a woman who's been parting her hair "the opposite way" for over a decade because Seventeen magazine told her to, in an issue she probably read on her bedroom floor as a teenager. It got me thinking about every random tip 2000s-era magazines planted in our brains that we never once thought to question.

One commenter said she's been shaving her legs with conditioner for over twenty years because of something she read in Teen Vogue back in the day. Twenty years, from one stranger's tip in a magazine that no longer even exists.

I grew up on the same content — clips from Cosmo, Seventeen, and Glamour spread across my bedroom floor in Queens — and the nostalgia of it is genuinely funny to me. What isn't funny is remembering those same magazines telling us to count calories and fear carbs, right on the very next page. I think I speak for most millennial women when I say we didn't separate the two; we just believed all of it.

I've spent years unlearning the food part, but I'm not sure I ever unlearned the reflex underneath it: believing whatever's printed with enough confidence, no questions asked. Which feels a little terrifying now that "printed" has become "posted," and instead of three magazines a month, it's thousands of messages a day, from people whose only credential is that they seem confident on camera.

Twenty years is a long time to keep a hair part because one magazine said so, once, decades ago. It makes me wonder what we're believing right now, from someone with a ring light and zero medical degree, that we'll look back on in twenty years and say, "what the hell were we thinking?"