For a long time, I’ve wanted to cover an early 2000’s teen magazine for this website, you know, the ones that were all about girl power! Which meant that girls power the economy by buying our patented anti-ugly bitch cream. While American magazines from this era were pretty nuts, they had nothing on what was going on in Japan, where egg magazine was publishing the latest in Gyaru fashion, a type of style I’d call Jersey Shore meets Jersey Shore harder, oh God, they’ve fused and are attacking New York City! Egg promoted big wigs, bigger hats, and spray tans that might legally constitute a hate crime.
I saw one website refer to Gyaru as an “American casual style” but that feels like me dressing up as Super Mario and calling it Italian Casual. I don’t know what American casual in the early 2000’s was exactly, but it probably wasn’t this. Oh God, wait, was it this?
The majority of EGG magazine is pictures of young girls layered beside products. Sometimes there are tutorials with style tips such as how to look like you got kicked out of beauty school for a sinister plot to steal all of the wigs and combine them into one super wig. An “Autumn Hair Arrange” is what I think emergency responders call it:
The fashion of egg can be pretty wild, but my favorite part of the outfits is when they sprinkle in a little random English, like a button on a hat that says “I heart surf” or “let’s gal” – things that are so close to the correct phrasing, but also far enough off that I feel like they might be clues to the location of a billionaire’s fortune. I look at a poem in an ad for jeans that begins, “Then I, in I am See,” and I want to go full National Treasure on that shit.
Honestly, the egg clothes don’t bother me so much; it’s the hair I keep coming back to. It’s the hair that haunts me. Hair seems to be very important to the Gyaru subculture, and the most vital thing about that hair is that it is big. One of the headlines assured me that “Hair Make Point.” Sometimes, that means they physically make a lot of points in the hair, and sometimes, it means that everyone should see your enormous floating wig pile drifting toward them from half a mile away. It’s as if all of these women are trying to look big to frighten off a bear. A “Big Head CARRY,” if you will.
Egg wasn’t just about how girls look. It also offered help to girls who are struggling in segments such as Gal Crisis! At least, I think this is an advice section where they pose one woman with exaggerated distressed expressions next to letters from readers asking for advice. Also, one of their lady issues seems to be getting groped in a cage? The point is, I wouldn’t take advice from egg. But in the early 2000’s, this was one of the few sources teen girls could go to if they were in gal crisis. It’s not a regular crisis; it’s a gal crisis, so it’s fun! Please help them.
Another interactive segment was “Photo Mail,” where Egg fans could send basically any grainy Razor flip phone photo, and Egg would publish it regardless of the content. The photos they got swung wildly from selfies of teen girls in silly makeup, to cute pictures of pets, to multiple takes of a Winnie the Pooh doll threesome. They published it all! No one was going to edit the Photo Mail section. They had wigs to buy, assemble, and unleash.
Was there other, non-Winnie-the-Pooh-getting-railed-in-a-blindfold sexual content in egg?
Sure, even though they called their ten-year anniversary issue “Girls History Of Egg,” it wasn’t just a magazine for girls. It was also for perverts, and they knew that. I don’t know what this arty photo shoot with some kind of anti-prejudice message is all about, but I know they decided to spice it up by adding a woman double-fisting popsicles and showing her ass. I spiced it up even more with a Winnie the Pooh Getting Railed in a Blindfold sticker.
There are also random porny cartoons dotted throughout the magazine. It’s real whiplash to turn the pages and see a girl in a fedora, another girl in a fedora, a girl in a comically oversized scarf, and then a cartoon of a woman with a squirrel tail in lingerie being gazed at by a man with eight psychedelic mushroom penises bursting from his jeans. You know, for example.
I will say this is one of the weirder cartoons. Usually, they are pretty typical depictions of a man and a woman having sex where the woman looks sort of bored, like maybe the punchline is that the man is doing a bad job. Typically there are way fewer psychedelic mushroom penises involved, two or three max.
Egg would occasionally release a themed holiday issue, my favorite of which is the Halloween issue, also known as “Battle of Halloween party.” Halloween is probably the second biggest holiday for eggs, so it makes sense they decided to go all out for this one. Based on the cover, you might think that they didn’t feature any actual Halloween costumes, but oh boy you would be wrong.
I respect egg Battle of Halloween party because they covered all the typical girly Halloween costumes. They did sexy Minions, sexy witches, and a sexy party animal, which is just a girl in normal clothes eating a banana, but they also didn’t shy away from more controversial sexy costumes like “The sexy military.” They’re doing the sexy wars. It’s like the regular military but in way lower-cut shirts that say, “Whassup, dawg.”
The Halloween issue also has a horror makeup tutorial of a girl with her mouth sewn shut that will genuinely give you nightmares. I liked the sexy military better than I like the sexy face accident. Hell, I’d take the sexy minions. They were also holding bananas. Are bananas an integral part of Halloween in egg? Does a “Whassup, dawg” iron-on denote an officer in the sexy military? Was it a special occasion, or do those three Poohs fuck like that every ni– AaAaaAAH, I forgot this was the picture I was talking about:
In case you’re thinking egg only set out to traumatize women, let me tell you right now, there is a men’s egg. They released monthly issues alongside regular egg and even had special editions such as men’s egg HAIRS. The HAIRS issue features many hairstyles of the day that work for both young Japanese men in Final Fantasy cutscenes and middle-aged white women who come into a restaurant five minutes before closing and order a three-course meal.
Egg started publishing in 1995 and stopped in 2014 due to the decline in popularity of… all the things it said were cool. That is until it was resurrected in 2018, rising from the egg of its own fallen egg, it started publishing online and has released several physical issues, although it’s no longer a monthly publication. They seem to be a little more similar to GOOP now, with one issue headlined “egg’s soul massage.” They even introduced a new face of egg in 2023. It looks a lot like the old face of egg, but the hair is certainly more manageable, which I’m thankful for. This version of egg haunts me less, although it stares directly into my soul more. Massaging it.
Today’s egg is toned down; classier, some might say. I’m not that person, but I can see where some might say that. Some of the things I learned in egg gave me a gal crisis. I might still be having it now. Thank God it’s just a gal crisis and not the regular kind. According to egg, I can solve this by eating cylindrical food and joining the sexy military. I’ll be fine.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Cuevas, who died triggering a booby trap of pointy wigs in search of a Japanese jeans treasure. RIP.
One reply on “Learning Day: EGG 🌭”
As usual, it is impossible to tell when/if Japan is making fun of us.
I don’t speak or read the language, but based on all the evidence available, I don’t think Japanese has a word for “subtlety”.
It’s why they invented kaiju, and giant robots made of smaller giant robots to fight them.
All I know is reading this article probably put my name on several lists:
Egg looks like something from the pre-internet 90s that my friends and I would pass around furtively until we met that kid from the crappy neighborhood with the divorced mom working two jobs who had access to porn.