I think a teen skin is either skins depicting young people, or skins with "teen rated" elements e.g skimpy clothing, memes, etc.

Nowadays, Teen skins would be a mix of Memes, Girls in skimpy clothing, and tryhards..

Teen skins are skins of a young person.
I'm tired of everyone saying they are all the same.
Every teen skin has the skinner's time & effort in it.
Unless people mean a skin that's been copied like 50 times,
they are all unique.

Wait... there's a skin section? I comepletely forgot about that section, but I do admit that I used to browse there when I only lurked and had nothing better to do. But when I started actually being a part of the community, I stopped visiting there unless it was for an interesting theme for a contest and I'd check out the top 100 for it. As for my description of 'teen skins', I usualy saw 2x2 eyes, hoodie, jeans, and usually simplistic shading, but the skins never really affected me since I'd usually be pretty aimlessly combing through skins.

Teen skins in my head are Skins of Teens, like the name says.
Now I understand why people would disagree because everyone has a different thought about when, and when something is not a "teen".

That's my short definition and explanation :p

Other than its kind of self explanatory looks, I think what really makes a teen skin is that the skin is already restricted to fit around one theme. That theme being a teen. Wether you can bend that to also fit into different type of categories like aliens or whatever comes to mind still doesnt change that it is already lacking in originality and creativity because of having to make it appear more human than what it really could be / being limited to one view. It's also a very common type of skin that appeals to a huge portion of the minecraft community, which is why I believe it doesn't hold as much value as other type of skins. They're also all very similar because they are so massively and frequently made. They're obviously not all exactly the same, but its rare to see anything that has taken several weeks or maybe months to be made into something more polished and different than the norm since they all roughly follow a traditional basis/format.
It just kind of gets boring to look at more of the same, especially since theres a lot of room for improvement too.
Just some thoughts though..

What's funny is that I have been calling them teenager skins way before I even knew they were actually classified as that. Back then, teen skins to me were ones that had a hoodie, 2x2 eyes, and most of the time had the left eye covered with hair. They seem to have evolved now though.

Well idk how to described them but..... I wish I would've discovered pmc much sooner, cause right now 2018, whenver i come to pmc, I'm surrounded by teen skins, teen skins here, teen skins there.... it doesn't end xD ( tbh some of them are really original and creative, but most of them just look repetitive and their style looking pretty similar, some of them even identical)

Hmm, I would say my definition of a "teen" minecraft skin is much like Havingfun_ISKEY said, they almost all look the same to me. I don't understand what the draw is for them anyway. I stay away from those kind of skins for my part.

The term has evolved to be something other than actual teenage skins. I think Iskey does a good job of explaining it. Definitely not what Azie said. The teen skinners who use their own style are good people (love you) but a lot of times, teen skinners just mimic each other's styles and it becomes an endless cycle of recycling hair shading trends.

Teen skins are of human (almost always) girls with stylish clothing, 2-pixel high eyes, and usually are accompanied by a cringey title of song lyrics and fancy fonts. They make up the majority of the popreel, and a lot of them look very alike, which is why they are hated so much (along with the fact that a lot of the people who make them are seen as “cringey” by the elites for being overly sensitive, immature tumblr-browsing LGBT girls I guess. Note: There is nothing wrong with liking tumblr or being gay in my book; I just think most people think it’s a little strange that most of them claim to be LGBT when realistically, most of the general population isn’t, and well, tumblr is tumblr.)

Anyways, I think the whole debate is a little stupid and a little old. I definitely see and sometimes feel the frustration that they’re usually what composes the entire skin popreel, but none of the people who usually complain post frequently or seem to have an ounce of respect in them whatsoever. Most of the critics that are popular for being talented non-teen skinners don’t seem to be much more mature than the teen skinners they complain about. There are definitely exceptions, but this is what I have seen.

Anyways, I honestly think it’s ridiculous mainly because teen skins don’t hurt anyone, and honestly, this is Minecraft, get over it. People overreact way too much. It reminds me a little of the time a bunch of people threw a fit because I was chosen to judge a skin contest, and apparently I wasn’t good enough of a skinner to do so. I’d rather have a popreel composed of teen skins than a completely dead site. At least teen skins make a large audience on PMC happy and it brings some traction to the site.

I think it comes from the term that, most people who make those styles of skins are teens. Also the really good shading on them says that too. And the taste in clothes? After awhile, I think a lot of people, including nonteens, took the shading and twisted a bit. Now there are lots of different shadings of teen skins. But tbh, there's so many teen-skinners that have different shading for the body and hair. The only thing that makes a teen skin a teen skin, is the hair overlay.

Skins that depict human, teenage characters.

I feel like when most people complain about "teen skins" though, they're talking about stuff like this:



These kinds of skins are largely part-picked and edited then re-posted by others and are pretty much unoriginal in every way. There are plenty of people on our site that make skins that qualify as a "teen skin" in my eyes, but they're really good at picking colors and doing neat things in expressing different types of hair and clothing. There are a couple from the Limited Colors Palette contest that come to mind that I gave diamonds to.

It's probably worth adding that the ratio of female to male skins that are actually GOOD is waaaay skewed. Tons of girl skins and hardly any good ones that are male.