As I sat at the salon in my stylist’s chair recently, I had some random beauty flashbacks. It would make me so happy if you’d share some of your own memories of grooming products that you once used religiously.

• Exclamation Body Spray: Any 80’s child will remember this black and white aerosol can. For roughly $1 you could purchase a mini version of this cough-inducing scent. Each morning I’d proudly douse myself in the trendy spray and head off to junior high.
• Vanilla Fields: How memory-evoking it would be to get a whiff of the scent of vanilla married with alcohol. Vanilla Fields was another one of my Denison Middle School beauty attempts gone wrong. All wrong.
• Pick: Freshman year in high school, without fail, I had a colorful pick sticking out of my back pocket a la Danny Zuko in Grease. You know, in case I had a hair emergency or something.
• Curling Iron: My very thick head of adolescent hair looked more like a lion’s bed-head. Since flat-irons weren’t a thing yet, I would use a curling iron to tame my mane as best I could. This involved roughly 45 minutes of preparation each morning as I worked on every curl to rid it of its frizz.
• Ponytail: After all the fuss to curl my hair to perfection, I’d still pull it back in a high pony within an hour after leaving my house due to the humidity’s effect on my locks.
• Scrunchies: Naturally, I used a scrunchy to put my hair up. Red, black, purple, you name it, I had a color to match every outfit. They doubled as a bracelet accessory until I needed it to draw back my hair curtain to reveal my face.
• Salon Selectives: A plethora of fruity scents were carefully rummaged through before I selected (ha!) just the right sugary sweet one to spritz my hair into place. And who could forget the spray nozzle that would always clog up resulting in sticky hands and likely a test spray in the face.
• Caboodles: To this day I still possess my giant plastic teal Caboodles kit that is reminiscent of a Transformer with all its pull-out drawers and flip-up mirrors and such. The idea was to keep all of my make-up in one organized storage container. Instead it quickly became a home for my rubber stamps, ink pads, etc.
• Sun-In: This spray was like my cheap, DIY way of highlighting my hair. It was bad. Really bad. Besides the stink, it just bleached out my hair with no regards for, well, my looks.

My current beauty regimen doesn’t look that much different save some slightly more expensive products and a much smaller make-up bag. I still feel clueless most days, trying different lotions and potions until I get my outer shell looking halfway decent. But at least I don’t wreak of overpowering vanilla stink.