7 Insights I Gleaned After Rereading Issues of Teen Magazine from 1991-96 [With Pictures]

 Recently, I came into the possession of a number of issues of Teen Magazine from the early to mid 1990’s.  I found them in the free bin at my library.  One night while walking out the door of my workplace,  I recognized the cover of one of the issues from my early teenagehood and grabbed it before anyone else noticed.  I took it home and excitedly shared my find with my husband.  It was so much fun to browse the articles and look at the advertisements that I decided to check and see if there were more in the free bin the next time I worked.  After my next foray into the free bin, I ended up with nine Teen magazines in total.
The funny thing is that I remember many of the issues.  I can’t entirely remember if I had a subscription the entire time or not, but I do know that I read it most months from ages 11-15.  For the uninitiated, Teen was lifestyle magazine for preteen and younger teens that was very popular in the early and mid-1990’s.  I first became acquainted with the magazine when I was in 4th grade and my older sister had her tonsils removed and stayed in the hospital overnight.  Someone bought her a copy of the magazine in the hospital gift shop to read during her recovery.  We shared a bedroom, so when she brought it home from the hospital, I  took the opportunity to read it, of course.

This is the part of the blog post where I perhaps admit too much about who I was when I was then but I probably put too much stock in what Teen had to say about all aspects of my life.  After reexamining the magazine, I can see how Teen was designed to be entertaining but also could cause a lot of insecurities about how a young person dresses, looks, acts, and the products they use.  Looking back now, I think I should have spent less time reading Teen and the other magazines like it—-I am calling you out too YM and Seventeen!

In any case here are:

7 Insights I Gleaned from Reading Back Issues of ‘Teen

1. Lip Smackers and Sun-In are essential products for looking great! Actually, according to Teen all makeup is essential  but especially Lip Smakers and Sun-In.

   

   

   2. In the early and mid 1990’s magazines had both color pages and black and photos and sometimes both in one spread.  The text and background were often colored in but the photos where often only in one color.  It is funny to remember that color printing in magazines and newspapers wasn’t always the norm.

   

   

   3. The Age 10-15 female demographic that Teen catered to was a strange demographic. (Here is the link for the Wikipedia article on Teen and their readership.)  What that means is that you end up with advertisements like the one below for Babysitters Club Dolls and a magazine cover that touts “4 Weeks To a Better Body-Shape Up Now!” all in the same issue.  It is like they were trying to give 11 year olds an eating disorder.

   

   

   4. The covers send a ton of mixed messages and seemed designed to breed insecurities!   Here is one of my favorites:

   

   5.  Also let’s address the elephant in the room.  Teen assumes that its readers are heterosexual and that they define themselves by whether they have a boyfriend or not.  Eight of the nine issues of Teen in my possession feature some sort of headline on the cover that references either how to get a boyfriend, why you don’t have a boyfriend, or how to deal with breaking up with a boyfriend.
   

   6. Browsing the magazines helped me remember 90’s era celebrities–But Teen did seem to focus mostly on young male celebrities. (Bonus points if you can identify all four young men in the picture below).
   

   

   

   

   

   7.  I did not expect browsing the magazines to make me feel sad about what Teen’s vision for young women was.  Granted, I spent a lot of time browsing the magazines to write this blog post so maybe I have been over thinking this issue but I started to hate this magazine after a while.  At first browsing the magazines was fun.  I liked looking at the advertisements and the 1990’s fashions, but when I started really thinking about the content, that is when it started to bother me.

   Consider this page about what female celebrities.  It is a beauty piece about which stars are sporting a look that highlights their features and which celebrities are detracting from their looks with a bad hair style or bad makeup.

   

Here is a Close-Up of some of the blurbs:

Jeeze, I know catty magazine spreads were very 1994 but still. . . It seems like something is missing. I don’t know if all decades feel toxic for young woman but some of the things in Teen seemed less like entertainment and more like bullying via magazine.
I think it is important to remember that young girls were all reading these magazines in the early and mid-1990’s because the internet wasn’t around yet (at least not for the average person).  Reading this type of magazine was how the average girl got her entertainment, fashion, and teenage life news.  I know an arguement could be made that I should have just read a different magazine, but the other major magazines of the time, YM and Seventeen, were pretty much the same just a different brand.
For a time, my older sister had a subscription to Sassy magazine, which focused more on indie and alternative rock music.  I read Sassy but I found that I did not really know the bands it highlighted.  Additionally, I lived in small town America and my pharmacy and grocery store only carried so many magazine titles for teens.  What’s a girl to do?  This time period also existed before a Barnes and Noble, with its rows and rows of magazines, could be found near every mall in America.  During this time period Teen was queen, at least in my small town America junior high.

In any case, I had hoped to end this post on a fun note.

Remember all the sporty things girls could do if they used Tampax?

Now That’s Trust!

Do you want your very own early 1990’s issue of Teen? Replay in the comment section and I will get it to you.
What do you remember about the early-mid 1990’s? Reply in the comment section.