Before You Were Hot: Reveling In Past Mistakes

A site that encourages readers to send in photos of their past fashion mistakes (before they were hot) and current photos (after hotness has been attained) seems like it could easily devolve into a HotOrNot.com morass of dickery and arrogance. Lucikly, creators Anne and Melissa keep it cool.-

The goal of their site, Before You Were Hot, is to create a sort of interblag group hug because "we were all in this awkward phase together!" but now, presumably, are "super hot." There's more than enough photo evidence to back this up.  (The girl in the main photo, btw, is Glamour Blogger Erin Meanley. She definitely turned out hot.) Check out the mulletted, permed, stirrup-clad beginnings of current lookers:

Lisa and Gina, pre-hotness. Go to the site to see how they cleaned up their act.

One of the most charming aspects of the site is the inclusion of readers' memories of those nuclear mistakes that led to their hotness being so hidden. One reader notes that the leaning-on-tourist-site-cannon pose he's displaying in his photo was "cribbed from Never Say Never." Another recalls, "I was trying to jazz it up with the big-banged look of the early-90s that I saw on all the cool high school girls at the roller rink." Meanwhile, Evan - who now looks quite dapper:

- reminisces that the sombrero necklace he sports in his pre-hot pic was a souvenir from Mexico, and was later lost "whilst riding the Turkish Twist at Riverside Amusement Park." His favorite part of his old photo "besides the popped collar, is the sweatpants tucked into the Converse." Oh come on, it can't be as bad as all that, right? Wrong:

And with website category headings like "braces," "boy necklaces," "hyper-color," and "scrunchies," there's plenty more where that came from! The blog only went live a week ago, and we're already addicted. In the interest of sharing our own past style oopsies, we offer this, our most awkward look:

Omgz, that is not a good color for us. Thank God we're hot now.

[All non-fetal photos courtesy of Before You Were Hot]