For angsty wannabe-alt-girls in their early teens, it’s pretty much a rite of passage to accept Effy Stonem of Skins as a patron saint.  

Since its genesis in 2009, the popular British TV show became a hallmark of adolescent hedonism, and even now, you can’t walk five feet down a middle or high school hallway without tripping over someone attempting to replicate its it-girl’s slept-in-my-makeup brand of cool.  Those indoctrinated into the cult of Effy Stonem would pile on black eyeliner, work up the nerve to wear fishnets to school, steal a cigarette from their parents if they were lucky, and wait for everyone else to recognize that they were deep and mysterious and worthy of obsession.

Alexandra Dudley started watching Skins her sophomore year of high school, and immediately felt a connection to the character.

“She doesn’t care what anyone thinks or says about her and she does what she wants, and I think that’s why a lot of people love her. And then obviously, 15-year-old me wanted to be out partying and doing drugs like her because I thought she was so cool,” she says.

Lex Garcia-Ruiz feels similarly, stating, “I think that Effy was the epitome of the Tumblr girl that we all wanted to be. Mental illness was romanticized all over Tumblr the same way it was in Skins, so you wanted to be her, you wanted people to think you were like her, especially if you were a bit of an outcast or a loner.  You wanted to be that different, ‘not like other girls’ cool girl that Effy was.”

This represents the core of the Effy obsession, and also the crux of the problem with it. She was the ultimate Cool Girl-- enigmatic, beautiful, and always down for a good time. However, the traits that made her so memorable are what make her problematic as an ideal: she became an aesthetic more than a three-dimensional character, and her host of very real issues (addiction, depression, and bipolar disorder) became a part of that image rather than being depicted as legitimate problems to be fleshed out and overcome. 

This becomes especially evident when shown through the lens of Skins’ male protagonists, Cook and Freddie.  Effy’s mental illness was essentially boiled down to two things: a convenient addition to her characterization as a beautiful mess, and something to put her in a position where she needed to be saved by a love interest. 

While it’s unlikely that making depression and substance abuse seem cool and sexy was the ultimate aim of Skins, this portrayal points to a worrisome correlation between mental illness and romantic attention.  Effy does not present as a mentally ill teenager in need of compassion and help, but as a symbol of sex appeal and anarchy—the driving force behind her status as an idol lies squarely in her desirability.  

Tiffany Carbon, another Skins fan, says that creating characters like this leads to viewers “trying to emulate them and almost forcing yourself to be sad, and trying to make yourself believe you were going through the same things and then putting yourself in that mindset.”

Garcia-Ruiz agrees, stating, “They initiated habits, and once you build a habit it’s very hard to break. It kind of grows beyond the show and wanting to be them—it’s just a habit that you have now that you picked up from these characters.”

Because of the increased awareness of mental health in recent years, it’s becoming less the norm to glamorize mental illness and substance use by painting them in the shape of a smoky-eyed, fishnet-clad hottie. Shows like Euphoria could be accused of taking its UK ancestor to new heights by packaging similar issues into a glittering, technicolor suburban dreamscape; however, the difference here is that Euphoria, while not entirely based in reality, portrays the low lows of addiction and mental illness in devastating detail. Euphoria’s teens aren’t just on a drug-fueled romp from party to party—we get to see the day after the bender, the hangover, the consequence of the shitty thing they did while drunk. This is an important contrast that Skins never bothered to explore.

Skins was revolutionary in its full-steam approach to taboo subjects like sex, teen drug use, and mental illness, but it often failed to avoid glamorizing the topics it attempted to call attention to.  I’ll always love Skins for its nostalgia factor and unreasonable Y2K fashion sense, but as a show aimed at teenagers, I wish it had tackled serious issues more responsibly.