The 2000s were pretty wild. One minute, you were playing a CD labeled “Car Jams” that you burned yourself, and the next, you were begging your mom for minutes so you could text your friend “LOL.” Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff from this era vanished rather quickly, even though they were so important at this time. Here are 15 things that blew up in the 2000s and then suddenly disappeared.
Layered Tank Tops
Around 2004–2008, people loved layering tank tops in different colors, and you’d see girls wearing two or three at a time. They were usually long enough to hang below the hips. People matched them with chunky belts or low-rise jeans to create a look that was certainly…unique. That is, until stores cleared out the racks, and layered tank tops never really came back into style.
Frosted Lip Gloss From a Squeeze Tube
Every teen bag had a tube of frosted lip gloss, and it didn’t matter if yours was sticky enough to trap insects. Unless your lips were shimmering, you weren’t doing it right. They smelled like fake fruit and tasted like chemicals, but while gloss stuck around, this weird jelly-in-a-tube format disappeared. People would reapply them every five minutes, even though the shine barely stayed.
Slim CD Wallets
Going on a long drive involved flipping through a 100-CD zip binder labeled with things like “Summer Bops” or “Crying in the Rain Mix” in Sharpie. Everyone had one. You’d slide them under the passenger seat or wedge them in the glovebox, and while they scratched easily, no one really cared. But once streaming showed up and car stereos caught up, we shoved those burned mixes in a closet or tossed them altogether.
CD-ROM Games in Cereal Boxes
Speaking of CDs, we’re not sure who decided cereal and PC games were a good combination, but it worked. You’d open your box of Honey Nut Cheerios to find a free copy of something like “Chex Quest.” Many kids looked forward to going down the cereal aisle to check what games were in stock. Then laptops ditched disc drives, and cereal boxes stopped including bonuses. Now, cereal’s just cereal again.
Zune MP3 Players
Microsoft’s answer to the iPod was actually pretty cool, in all fairness. It let you share songs (sort of) and had a clean design that made it look like a gadget from the future. Like the iPod, it also had its own music store, called the Zune Marketplace. But it never really caught on because Apple had already monopolized the music market, which led to Microsoft pulling the plug in 2011.
Silly Bandz
Silly Bandz were rubber band bracelets that became very popular around 2010, and they were elastic bands that snapped back into shapes like animals or letters. People traded and hoarded them like treasure, which led to many schools banning them entirely. You could buy them in themed packs, like ocean animals, food, and holidays, then wear twenty at a time. However, one day, they just stopped being a thing, and it was bye-bye Bandz.
Polyphonic Ringtones
In the 2000s, you’d see many commercials with codes like “Text 4433 to get ‘Crazy Frog!'” which would give your flip phone a grainy ringtone version of your favorite song. It cost like $2.99, and some of them were subscription traps that billed you weekly. But as soon as people could set actual MP3s as ringtones, that whole market tanked. There was no need for these low-quality tones anymore.
Colored Transparent Tech
For a while, electronics didn’t just work, but they had style. See-through purple Game Boys and neon blue staplers were all the rage because they looked as fun as they did futuristic. Unfortunately, by the end of the 2000s, minimalism came in hard after Apple went gray and the rest of the tech world followed. Clear plastic looked cheap instead of cool, and stores ditched the look, which is why you don’t see anything like that on shelves anymore.
Barrel Key Lock Diaries
Every mall bookstore had a rack of those tiny diaries with a shiny lock and a two-inch key. Of course, most kids didn’t trust them to actually keep anything private, but that wasn’t the point. They were for writing the names of your crushes and drawing pictures of your favorite band’s logos. These days, you’d have to hunt one down online. Most people just type their thoughts into a notes app, if they do it at all.
Giga Pets
Giga Pets hit shelves right after Tamagotchis exploded, and looking after them was practically a part-time job. You had to feed them, clean them, discipline them, and then try not to get caught checking on them during math class. One of the most traumatic childhood memories of the 2000s was when your pet died. However, once smartphones arrived and app games took over, nobody wanted to babysit a plastic pixel blob anymore.
Inflatable Furniture
Teen rooms in the 2000s weren’t complete without at least one clear or neon inflatable chair, which sometimes came with matching footrests. But they didn’t really hold air for long, and they weren’t exactly comfortable, yet everyone loved them because they looked cool. Eventually, they popped or stopped being sold, with people moving on to actual furniture that didn’t squeak every time you moved.
Spray Hair Glitter
Spray hair glitter was at every sleepover and school dance. It covered your hair in sparkly dust that never fully washed out, and while kids thought it was cool, parents hated it. Teachers banned it. The cans stuck around for a few years, then disappeared once everyone realized how messy and annoying it was. It usually looked good for ten minutes, and that was it.
Pepsi Blue
Pepsi Blue launched in 2002, and the hype for it was real, mostly because it looked like a bottle of melted Slurpee. It had a weird “berry cola” flavor that confused everyone at first. Even so, the drink made it into music videos and store fridges everywhere after Pepsi threw a bunch of marketing money at it. They assumed the blue color would do the heavy lifting, and for a while, it worked. But by 2004, it was off the market and has only made a few comeback appearances since.
Heelys in Schools
You weren’t a real problem in school until you showed up with wheels in your shoes. Heelys gave kids a license to literally coast through life, which is one of the reasons that teachers absolutely hated these things. It didn’t take long for schools to crack down and threaten any Heelys wearers with detentions or even suspensions. To nobody’s surprise, these shoes disappeared soon after.
Low-Rise Jeans Everywhere
In the 2000s, low-rise jeans were unavoidable, and every store had racks of them. They’d sit way below your waist, and people usually paired them with cropped tops or visible thongs, thanks to the “whale tail” trend. Then, out of nowhere, people just stopped wearing them. High-waisted jeans made a comeback, which meant that low-rise completely disappeared from shelves, except for a few throwback moments.
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