Ten years ago today, at an hour well past our bedtime, we plonked our rebellious 13-year-old selves down on the sofa to watch a new E4 drama that we didn't understand the name of.
After 40 minutes of swearing, shagging, a hell of a lot of smoking (from the characters, not us), and getting increasingly nervous about that drug dealer called Mad Twatter we were left shocked.
And not just because the most drama our pre-teen selves had been exposed to previously was Chlo and Dante running away together on Waterloo Road, but because we never realised TV could be so exciting.
That was the start of our Skins addiction.
"Shit," we gasped to ourselves. "Is this what it's like, adolescence? Are we to imminently go off the rails, befriend old drug dealers and smoke a huge (and looking back very unrealistic) amount of weed?"
Turned out no, it wasn't. And we absolutely definitely weren't – but watching a load of posh teenagers from Bristol battle issues like mental illness, addiction and grief – all while still managing to be obscenely funny and have a great time was going to define our adolescence in so many ways.
Yeah, we watched too much TV. But no regrets.
We'll start with the first generation. Which was obviously superior to its successor, and a million worlds away from the third. Or the absolute unfathomably awful one that followed and killed Naomi.
We pretend that never happened.
Tony Stonem was the first fuckboy in our lives. And he got us warmed up for all the others that followed. He was probably our first crush that extended further than an-innocently-wanting-someone-to-cuddle-and-watch-High-School-Musical-with type fantasy, if you catch our drift.
We've all had a Tony Stonem or two. And while most end up getting confined to our fuckboy rubbish bin rather than getting hit by a bus and having a personality change, we're thankful to him for introducing us to the all real, and often pretty shit, world of dating. Something that Disney (and Waterloo Road) had failed to do.
As well as wanting to date a Stonem, we also wanted to be one. We're not (that) embarrassed to say our slightly tragic wannabe-edgy 14-year-old selves donned all black, applied too much black eye shadow and channelled out inner Effy Stonem more than a few times at whatever kind of teenage field party we found ourselves at. Being a teenager without having an angsty cultural heroine to look up to sounds no fun at all, and Effy was ours. In hindsight she was literally the most annoying girl on the planet, but we were young and impressionable.
Skins generation one was the first, and pretty much only to this day, show to make us laugh, cry, and experience feelings of sadness we didn't realise possible from TV (Cassie crying and eating an apple in New York after Chris died while Hometown Glory was playing, waaaaaa).
It may have been entirely premised on a load of young people taking an amount of drugs it now seems impossible they'd have been able to afford, but it was also delivered us many of our first experiences of proper deep, real and shocking TV.
Everything from Cassie's eating disorder and Tony getting hit by a truck to Sketch wanking on camera and Effy shooting up in a golf club were the types of taboo subjects we'd never seen on screen before, and we're pretty sure it matured us in a weird kind of way we never expected.
And its soundtrack - Crystal Castles, Pendulum, Foals, and never forgetting the MGMT final credits - was as current and cool for us then as it's nostalgic for us now – and featured heavily on the playlists of our many wannabe-Skins house parties.
Then came the second generation, which wasn't as good or as emotive (or maybe we’d just grown up a bit), but still clutched on to the Skins magic. Cook and Freddie came skating (literally) into our lives when our tastes in men had matured beyond fuckboys with bowl cuts.
And we fell deeply in love.
Unlike our Twilight or Pop Idol crushes, it was very much OK to be both Team Cook and Freddie. And we may have stopped dressing like Effy by this point, but we'd still have done literally anything to have been in that love triangle.
And as she grew up and became (slightly) less of a dick, so did we. We now realised that adolescence wasn't the great big orgy that we, or Cook standing outside Pandora's sleepover, thought it would be. But Skins wasn't any less important to our lives.
We'll always have a place in our heart for the show that did so much for our trying-desperately-to-be-cool adolescent selves.
All 7 seasons of Skins are available to watch now on All 4 here