Day 38 #100DaysOfOldDays

Because we had no Instagram or TikTok, Facebook or Twitter in the 80’s, we had to buy our weekly teen magazines to keep up with the latest trends and to find out all the celebrity gossip.

Patches and Blue Jeans were my favourites. My friend used to buy Jackie and we’d often swap them around mid-week. They were around 20p each and we could only afford to buy one magazine a week.

In the centre fold of the magazine was a poster of a pop star, or a band, and sometimes a TV or film star. If we liked it, it went on our bedroom wall. Otherwise it stayed in the magazine or we passed it on to a friend.

The mags kept us up to date on the latest fashion trends. Rara skirts, neon colours, legwarmers, polka dots, fishnet tights and string tops. We had fingerless gloves, bangles galore, and big plastic earrings.

I have a photo somewhere of me (I’ll hunt it down) wearing a blue dress, blue nylon tights, blue calf length boots, blue plastic necklace with matching earrings. All in the same shade of royal blue. I was sitting on the surround of someone’s grave. I blame the magazines for that faux pas!

I particularly enjoyed the comics strips and feature length romance stories. I was in all of them!

The make-up tips were easy to follow. We didn’t need long YouTube tutorials to tell us how to rub on a wee bit of foundation and blue eyeshadow!

Sometimes we got a free pot of rouge or lip shiner sellotaped to the front cover. That made our day and we couldn’t wait until the next disco to get trying it out.

The problem page was a very important feature. It was so personal and someone always had the same problem as us. Cathy and Claire solved all the problems of the Jackie readers.

They also had quizzes with multiple choice answers, that helped us figure out important life stuff, like; Are you a Good Friend? Or Have you got a Magnetic Personality? When we had the full ten boxes ticked, we checked our score and matched it to the relevant answer. When the score was low, it gave advice on how to improve ourselves. Pure genius!!

Smash Hits was a big one when it made its way to our little corner of the universe. It was all about the pop stars and the music. And the best thing of all was, they had the lyrics of all the chart hits. Back then it was awful hard to learn the right words of a song. We had to tape the song from the wireless to the tape recorder. The DJ was a divil for talking during a song so he didn’t make it easy for us. We’d replay the song, pausing after a few words, write them down, and repeat until we had all the words. When Smash Hits came out and we got the lyrics, we realised we had half the words wrong. They sounded right, but they were wrong!

The magazines were a vital part of our lives in the 80’s.They held all the answers.

A fun fact I found out today; Children’s author, Jacqueline Wilson, wrote a lot of stories and articles for Jackie magazine!