1. If you were a teenage girl in the mid-'00s, chances are you begged your mum for chunky highlights.
You knew that having stripy hair would instantly make you cool.
2. Because literally everyone you considered pretty had them, which meant you needed them too.
Jessica Simpson, Kimberley Walsh, and Kelly Rowland were your hair idols.
3. All of your favourite bands sported chunky highlights.
4. Literally all of them.
5. Although, of course, Kelly Clarkson was your main inspiration.
There is a tiny part of you that still thinks she looks good with them.
6. If you're blonde, you probably tried to give yourself chunky highlights using lemon juice. Which was actually pretty effective.
Tried to put lemon juice in my hair so I could get some natural highlights while tanning. Got it in my eye. Please send help. 😵🍋💀
But it ~really~ hurt if you got the lemon juice in your eyes.
7. If your mum was really cool, she might have taken you to her salon to have a few highlights put in around your crown.
8. And sitting in front of the hairdresser's mirror with foil in your hair for the first time made you feel incredibly grown-up.
9. Or she might have helped you do it yourself at home.
10. If your mum wouldn't let you get highlights, you had to go to Superdrug with your friends after school.
11. And you knew exactly what you were looking for because you'd already read all the advice you could get your hands on in the problem pages of your favourite magazine.
They taught you that you had to do a patch test first to check you didn't have an allergic reaction.
12. In Superdrug you either picked up a bottle of Sun-In hair lightener, or a Clairol nice'n easy highlighter kit.
13. The next step was persuading a friend to highlight your hair while you read the instructions from the packet aloud.
14. Once your hair was finished, you knew you looked like a supermodel.
15. But getting chunky highlights was only the first step. In the '00s there was basically no point in even having hair unless it was straightened to within an inch of its life.
16. And to make sure you didn't burn your hair, you used Lee Stafford heat protection spray.
17. And even if your mum told you off, you knew the struggle had been worth it.
18. And even though looking back on the days of your chunky highlights is cringe now, you know you looked great at the time.
One of my biggest fears is that the chunky highlights of the early 2000's are going to come back into style.