9 Things Your Middle School Love Put In Their Hair

Ah, middle school. What a time to be alive. Even if being alive meant doing whatever it took to avoid your arch nemesis while trying to remember where you put the copious amount of worksheets your teacher gave you for no explainable reason. If the weird stuff that your middle school crush put in his or her hair was any indication, it was also a time to get weird. Really, really weird.

If you were in middle school in the mid-to-late '90s like I was, you know it's likely our crush's hair choices were not entirely his or her fault. We had a confluence of strange pop culture influences circling around us at all times: Should we put pink fuzzies in our hair like Britney, or cling to a suburbanized version of punk rock culture and dye our hair blue? Did we want to go for a more classic, subdued look, or were we ready to enter our teenage years kicking, screaming, and pissing our parents off by bleaching out our locks completely?

We couldn't yet get tattooed, we couldn't yet get pierced, and mom still bought most of our clothes. All that was left was our hair as a vehicle for self-expression, and boy, did we use it. And our crushes did, too. Here are nine things the love of your junior high life very likely rocked in their mane.

1. Wood Glue

That hot guy in your class used wood glue to spike his hair on the weekends, and for some reason you thought it was the coolest thing ever. Why wood glue, and not your run-of-the-mill Elmer's? I was once told by a particularly hot eighth grade dude that wood glue didn't flake off when it dried, making it superior to its classroom counterpart. I should have also asked how he got it out of his hair, because I still can't figure it out.

2. Kool-Aid

96-Pack Kool-Aid Grape, $24, amazon.com

It will make a huge mess, and your hair will transition from being completely sticky and disgusting to hard as a rock. Still, when your crush walked in with his or her tips dyed with the delicate crystals of the Kool-Aid Man himself, all you could think to yourself was, "OHHH YEAHHH."

3. Sun-In

Sun In Tropical Breeze Hair Lightener, $3.52, target.com

The more Sun In I saw someone spraying in their hair by the pool, the more I wrote about them desperately in my journal. Love still smells like lemons and peroxide to me.

4. Chunky Highlights

It was a massive trend, and the cute, popular girl in the class convinced her mom to let her do it. When she walked into the room, it was like those chunky zebra highlights sucked your soul straight from your body, storing it in one-inch sections across your crush's crown.

5. Manic Panic

Manic Panic Semi Permanent Hair Color Cream, $10.50, amazon.com

Today, we live for that amazing moment when our crushes open their cabinets and take out a French press and some fancy coffee. Back then, we lived for a dude with a Manic Panic arsenal in his bathroom.

6. LA Looks Styling Gel

LA Looks Extreme Sport Styling Gel, $8.34, amazon.com

If you tended towards athletes, jocks, and whatever the middle school-version of a bro was, then odds are your crush put this blue shellac in his hair — and you loved him deeply for it.

7. A Massive Claw

Prettyou Large Plastic Hair Clips, $11.99, amazon.com

An eight-inch claw makes no logical sense, when you think about it — no matter how long your hair was, these things were still longer than the distance from the top of your head to the back of your neck. Still, your beloved managed to make the look cool.

8. Tight Crimps

The tighter the crimp, the closer to god.

9. Hydrogen Peroxide

Turns out, your middle school crush was onto something: While it can be incredibly drying, beauty YouTube tells us that putting this stuff in your hair actually works. However, from my memory my crush never used a deep conditioner at the end of the process, so his hair was completely parched and he smelled like a hospital. Still hot, though.

Your middle school crushes may have put plenty of weird stuff in their hair, but you loved them in spite of it all. Actually, scratch that: You loved them because of it. Let's just hope that your current crushes never show up with a head full of wood glue.

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Images: Fotolia (2); Courtesy Brands; Columbia Pictures; Disney