The 12 Worst Products Of The '90s

People go to extraordinary lengths to reverse (or hide) hair loss. And in the '90s, anyone struggling with thinning hair was familiar with “spray-on hair.” 

The product is exactly what it sounds like. It came in a spray paint-like cannister, which you would spray on any bald spots on your head. The spray contained particles of powder, which would stick to any hair follicles. 

In the low-resolution infomercials of the time, the result looked amazingly like real hair. Yet in real life, the result looked pretty much like… well, spray paint. 

The product has such a bad reputation that in 2010, Time dubbed “hair in a can” as one of the worst inventions of all time. 

Food and drinks were highly marketing to the diet culture in the '90s, which meant that many new products were “low-fat” or even “fat-free.” And Frito-Lay hopped on this train in 1998 when they introduced WOW Chips. 

WOW Chips consisted of people's favorite Frito-Lay chips, including Lay’s, Doritos, and Ruffles, but they were made with a substance called olestra rather than fat. 

For those of you not familiar with olestra, it's a fat substitute with molecules that are too big for human bodies to digest – meaning it passes directly through the digestive tract. 

Does this remind you of any other product you can take? One that runs directly through your digestive tract? 

That's right – if you ate too many WOW Chips, you inadvertently gave yourself a laxative. 

Before this side effect was known, WOW Chips were doing amazing, raking in $347 million in sales the first year. However, as people learned of the bathroom-inducing properties of the chips, the sales fell off, dropping to $200 million by 2000. Ultimately, WOW Chips were rebranded to “Light” products in 2004. 

When you have to distribute a health disclaimer with a video game console, you're probably not looking at a gold mine of a product. 

This was true for Nintendo's Virtual Boy, which was released in 1995. The concept was actually ahead of its time: it was similar to the VR headsets that are available today. Yet, the technology wasn't ready yet. The screen was only black and red, and the system wasn't portable. The games were just meh, and there were reports of kids getting headaches and nausea from playing. 

Then there was the health disclaimer for potential long-term vision damage from playing the game console. 

The writing was pretty much on the wall for the Virtual Boy. It only sold 770,000 units total before being discontinued a year later. 

Listen to this sales pitch: “Pre-made cold coffee – all you have to do is just warm it up!” 

You might find yourself thinking, “Why not just make coffee then?” 

And you've just explained the problem with Maxwell's Ready-to-Drink coffee. It was sold in a carton in the refrigerated section, next to gallons of milk. Yet, it wasn't marketed as iced coffee. No, right on the label it had a steaming hot cup of coffee. 

Apparently, you were meant to pour out the coffee into a mug, and then warm up the liquid (likely by microwave). It seemed that people were much more interested in just brewing a fresh pot of joe than going through the work with this pre-made liquid. 

Yes, there really was a product called “BLO Pens” marketed at young children in the '90s.

The set was essentially kid-friendly airbrush pens that children would blow through to distribute the ink across included stencils. However, many people complained that the ink wouldn't come out, or would come out in strange, irregular bursts. The ink could (not surprisingly) get everywhere, turning into a cleaning nightmare for parents. 

And there was the issue of kids blowing so hard on the markers that they would give themselves headaches. 

Today we're blessed with Bluetooth headphones if we want to have a hands-free phone experience. But back in the ‘90s, phones were still mostly on cords. This meant that if you wanted to multitask, you had to do so holding the phone in your hand (or awkwardly doing that shoulder/neck pinch that we’ve all had to do before).

Enter the Phone Relief Headset, which was no ordinary headset. Well, actually, it was technically less than an ordinary headset, as it didn't come with a speaker or microphone. It was basically a headband. But it came with one special component: Velcro!

Yep, a piece of Velcro that you could attach to the backside of your phone. Then, the headset would attach to the phone via Velcro, thereby making your phone hands-free. 

It did the job, but we can't imagine anyone would want to be seen wearing the thing.