67 Yearbook Photos That Are The Perfect Example Of One’s Awkward Teenage Years

Real smiles tend to reach the eyes only when people feel relaxed, so what the camera usually catches is a polite grimace. Add hair styled by a parent in the car, a shirt chosen under pressure, and the fact that many students are in the middle of an awkward growth spurt, and you have the recipe for a legend.

And then there is the pressure. A yearbook photo is not a snapshot that vanishes into a camera roll. It gets printed in a book, handed to hundreds of classmates, and stored in a closet for decades, which means every flyaway hair earns its own permanent record. Even the famous are not safe. Conan O’Brien has apparently ordered five extra copies of his Harvard yearbook over the years because his own copies kept getting destroyed, as reported by The Harvard Crimson.

Then there are the backdrops. In the 1980s plenty of school portraits featured glowing, criss crossed laser lines, a look that was considered fashionable at the time. Years later a Tumblr called We Have Lasers gathered the evidence, and Time treated the laser backdrop as the ultimate shorthand for an awkward childhood photo, right up there with braces and enormous bangs. A mottled blue backdrop, a stiff pose, and a tilted head joined the party.

The good news is that the evidence will last. Lifetouch, a major school photo company, says its portraits are printed on paper meant to resist fading for up to a hundred years. So the pictures in this list are not going anywhere. Be kind to the faces below, because every one of us has a laser backdrop somewhere in our past.