As we look to our neighborhood magazine stand, we can start to notice the new crop of mags popping up to kick off spring. And mixed in with all that glorious spring fashion is the creme de la creme of prom style.

Obviously, we aren’t really looking for prom dresses (unless we’re robbing the cradle and dating high school boys), but just seeing these magazines dedicated to high school’s most important night really takes me back. I remember the stressful search for a date (found one a week before!),  coming up with the money for tickets (which, at my school, cost an arm and a leg both years), the limo (who’s friends are we going with, and the after party (who’s friends are we going with, aka, we’re going with my friends, get over it).

Yeah, prom was stressful, but totally worth it. I had a blast both times. Mostly because I spent 60% of the night shaking my groove thang, and the other 40% of the time staring at all the girls in their hideous prom dresses.  You know the ones I mean – the  fashion don’ts dresses that girls completely tricked out and possibly bedazzled to make prom super special. They were annoying then – ruining every picture when the flash reflected off all that sequins – but I loved every tacky minute of it. Even now I find myself drawn to dress department in Macy’s, watching young girls make the biggest fashion mistake of their lives.

So in honor of this joyous season, and some serious internet trawling to avoid the giant paper I have to finish before Spring Break, I bring you the ugliest prom dresses that the internet has to offer:

If teen magazines are to be believed, from January to June, there’s exactly one thing on every female high school student’s mind: prom. Or should I say: ~~*OMG PROM!!@! Only writing out the word like that can give it the respect it deserves.

According to sources like Seventeen, CosmoGirl (now only a website—RIP, CG!), and even classier options like Teen Vogue, prom is the absolute apex of a teenage girl’s existence. The big night apparently requires months of preparation and planning: who’s your date going to be? What are you going to wear? Can you get your dad to spring for a limo? Are you going to lose your virginity, or your dignity, or both? How will you resist the pressure to drink at the after parties? (… Because obviously, nobody ever voluntarily drinks alcohol in high school.)

I know what you’re probably thinking right now: “This is a website for women in college! Why is this stupid blogger talking about something that we all experienced years ago? I can barely remember my own prom. Sure, it seemed really important at the time, and I guess I had fun, but it definitely wasn’t actually the biggest night of my life.”

And that’s exactly my point. Prom fever, frankly, is totally ridiculous. Which makes it a prime topic for this column—because our culture inexplicably imbues this event with so much significance (can you think of a major teen movie that doesn’t end with a prom scene?), any articles that focus on prom are inevitably going to be teeming with Bad Advice for women, if you can call HS seniors “women.” That’s because there’s literally no reason any girl should make such a BFD out of prom in the first place.

But the most egregiously bad prom advice I’ve come across stands in a class of its own. It’s a specialized website on seventeen.com called the “Prom Dress Workout Finder.” The point of the site? To determine what kind of exercises you should be doing so that you don’t look like a big ‘ole cow in your dress of choice, no matter what style it is.

See, if you’re wearing a backless dress, you need to do a move called “The Usher,” according to Seventeen Trainer Jenna Philips in this workout video. But if you’re wearing a minidress, says trainer Jessica Smith, you have to do a different exercise to target your thighs. God help you if your dress is short and you’ve mistakenly been doing The Usher anyway. Probably, your date will end up dumping a bucket of blood on you or something.

It’s bad enough that girls are tricked into buying into the whole prom industry in the first place—but now they’re supposed to perform special exercise routines for the sole purpose of looking nice on a night that, truth be told, is probably going to end with their best friend throwing up on their shoes? There are plenty of great reasons to try to stay fit, but doing it in order to squeeze yourself into a certain dress is not one of them. I wish I could say that I expected better form you, Seventeen… but if I did, I’d be lying. Just like I did when I told my mom I’d be spending the night of prom at my best friend’s house.

It’s prom season! No, I don’t know this because I plan on cougaring it up and heading off to de-flower some high school senior on prom night. I know this because I was visually assaulted by hundreds of horrible sparkly dresses when I attempted to cure my weekend hangover at Nordstrom. And let me tell you – they did not help me with my task of “keeping vomit down.”

Why oh why do you have to put those things next to my beloved shoe department?!

All that taffeta got me thinkin’ back to my own dreadful prom night: my pastel blue dress, the flowers in my hair, my date who left the after-party because I thought I’d try a Mike’s Hard Lemonade for the first time…

Ah, memories…

I started getting a little nostalgic for that overpriced night of mediocre fun, so after I returned home (and pulled the trigger) I flipped through my old pics. And they are priceless. I realized that I am clearly not the only college girl with a book full of awkward posed photos chock full of hairspray and caked-on makeup. We all have ‘em…and we should all share ‘em.

So this is my call to all of you: send us your favorite prom pics! We are going to compile them all into one fantastically awkward post and share them with the world. The more cliche (in front of limo or not!) the better! You can block out people’s faces if you want, or let everyone see that smiled-so-much-my-cheeks-are-killing-me face.

Just attach ‘em to an email and send them to Lauren@collegecandy.com by Friday, April 24th and we’ll put them all together next week. And don’t worry; I guarantee mine are a whole lot worse than anything you can come up with. I left a deoderant smudge on my date’s shoulder…and didn’t realize until I’d gotten my 4 rolls of film back from CVS.

I’ve heard of girls wearing their hearts on their sleeves, but this is the first I’ve seen of wearing their vaginas on their dresses. WTF?

And P.S. Someone should tell this girl that a vagina that big is probably going to scare some boys away.