Paris Hilton, the ultimate icon to 00s teens, has just re-shared a fan post of her own teen self to her Instagram Story – and she looks so different. The black and white snap is captioned with Paris' name and '10th', which we presume to mean 10th grade, making mini Paris 15/16 years old and not too many years away from becoming the It Girl of all It Girls.
Now don't get me wrong, it's still distinctly Paris energy, and she's for sure recognisable to any Simple Life fan, or anyone who knew young Paris' face well. But I can't help feeling she's changed more than I'd have imagined.
Perhaps as Paris has barely changed in the last 20 years, maintaining a reassuring continuity of appearance (that nursed a generation into adulthood), it's odd to see that just a few years before we all knew her face, she was at school with an Alice band, choppy shoulder length layers and swooping bangs. Basically, Paris pre-extensions.
If you swipe through the carousel of other celeb yearbook photos from the fans original post, you're in for a treat. Not only is it a buffet of 90s and 00s hair and makeup (and oh the brows), but stars like Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, the Gossip Girl cast, as well as Kim and Kourtney Kardashian, prove that even without their glam squads, tweakments, celebrity skincare and training, they were all still offensively attractive.
I'm finally glad my secondary school only took photos when you started (cute) and when you left (which I declined to buy). The absence of any allows me to imagine in peace that I would have looked like the above in them.
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Elena Chabo is Cosmopolitan UK's former beauty writer, working on everything from buzzy celeb news and trending beauty, to sincere first-person reviews and engaging video content for social media. She also creates meatier features and expert-led how-to guides, for print and online. Her passion for Black beauty, textured hair, and the ways beauty interacts with culture, society, identity and relationships, quickly took over her writing career and led her into beauty journalism. Following an MA in Magazine Journalism in 2017, she cut her teeth across various roles at Stylist Magazine, before taking on a Digital Writer role at Good Housekeeping. It was here that beauty took centre stage and she launched and ran the site's first stand-alone beauty section. Remaining at Hearst, she joined the Cosmo beauty team in 2022. Find her on LinkedIn.
