No matter how often we drink throughout the year, there’s nothing worse than a New Year’s hangover. Everyone knows NYE is literally an invitation to black out, forget about all the mistakes you’ve made in the past 365 days, and maybe hook up with one more rando before your resolutions come into the picture. It’s the last hurrah of the year, and if you don’t wake up with mascara on your pillowcase and a colossal headache, you probably didn’t do it right. Although the New Year’s day sunglasses and Advil combo is inevitable, we’re here to discuss what types of alcohol are the worst for your hangover, and which are *slightly* better for you. In order from the worst to the best options, here’s what you should (and shouldn’t) be drinking:
5. Champagne & Tropical Drinks
If you want to play it safe on NYE, avoid bubbles and sugar. Champagne might be a New Year’s staple, but the combination of its bubbly texture and its added sugar is a recipe for an awful hangover, and it’s honestly not worth it. Like, you could be having stronger drinks that won’t screw you over in the morning, so just stay away—and if you must, stick with the driest (i.e., with the least added sugar) bubbly you can find. Tropical drinks are also a no-go. Aside from the fact that the mix of sugar and alcohol makes your hangover so much worse, it’s also just weird to be drinking some 14-year-old’s drink on NYE when your friends are taking shots. Put down the Piña Colada. It’s embarrassing.
4. Rum & Bourbon
People think rum wouldn’t give them such bad hangovers, but that’s only if you stick with the clear stuff, and then only if you don’t mix it with sugary bullshit—and have you ever heard of a rum drink that didn’t sound like it belonged on a Carnival cruise to Havana (ooh na na)? And as for dark rum, just, no. In fact, people say you should avoid dark alcohols in general. Bourbon is in the same category, but like, unless you’re an 80-year-old man holding a cigar and a newspaper, we’re assuming you’re not drinking bourbon on New Year’s. Either way, avoid both of these drinks and you’ll be fine the next morning. I mean, not fine, but better.
3. Beer
Beer isn’t great for your hangover because of its bubbles and carbs. But then again it doesn’t have that much alcohol in it, so if you’re actually hungover after only drinking beer, you need to get out more. Unless you literally have your head over a keg stand the whole night (or weigh like 100 pounds), you’re going to have to put in some work to get sufficiently wasted. Beer is a safe bet on New Year’s just like white wine is a safe bet on Spring break. You’ll feel fine, but like, at what cost?
2. Vodka/Tequila/Gin
If you want to keep things simple, stick with the basics and you can’t go wrong. Any clear alcohol is going to be better for you in terms of a hangover. A lot of people say tequila makes you less hungover than vodka, but it probably depends on the person. We’re not saying that you won’t get hungover by pounding tequila shots all night, but if you’re avoiding syrups and other additives in your drinks, you’ll be better off in the morning. Stick with clear shots and chase with a lime or lemon slice. Nothing with sugar, because that obviously defeats the purpose.
1. Sake
If you’re out with friends for sushi before you go out for the night, sake is actually a solid option for getting tipsy without too many repercussions. Apparently sake doesn’t lower your body temperature like wine or beer, and the ions in the water actually give you energy instead of making you crash. It’s kind of like mixing your alcohol with a sports drink that revitalizes your body and gives you energy. It’s also a great addition to your spicy tuna roll, so just do it.
Ah, Halloween—innovative costumes, chilling haunted house-inspired decor, and that crisp, cool weather we look forward to all year. Haaaa, I fucking wish. Idk if it’s the incessant articles about fall that I force my 59 followers friends to read or the pure rage I develop when my attempt at a slutty Poison Ivy costume somehow always ends up looking like Shrek, but what we think of Halloween actually only exists in places like Pinterest or borderline demonic Disney films. And yeah, it might sound like I’ve become a bitter bitch, but that’s only because I’m actually a bitter bitch.
Anyway, I’m not here to throw all my problems on you—my therapist frowned upon that. There’s a lot that goes into Halloween that never actually happens, and that’s honestly way too much work for an attempt at record-breaking Instagram likes on a night you probably won’t remember anyway. Thankfully, I’m here to let you down easy and tell you what to really expect come your boyfriend’s sister’s grand big’s monster bash, and why I think Halloween is the most overrated holiday (sorry, Satan, but I’m going to hell anyway). But if you’re one of those idiots who lives and breathes Halloween because you hate yourself so much that you have to be someone else to feel good, you can go shave your back now drown in your own bowl of Mini-Twix.
Actual convo we’ll have if you disagree with me:
Fall Weather
EXPECTATION: You’re already planning your pumpkin patch-inspired Instagram complete with that fall sweater from Nordstrom’s annual sale (BACK IN FUCKING JULY) that you’ve been harboring for like, seven years now. Once September hits, you’re about to rip the tags off your new leather boots, so you can eagerly mask your post-summer bloat in the cutest cozy fall attire, because you know what they say: boyfriends come and go, but leggings are forever.
REALITY: Don’t even get me started. Actually, never mind—I’ve already been triggered. I despise our garbage president for many reasons, but mostly because he’s apparently unaware of this thing called Global Warming that’s causing me to freeze my ass off, and then sweat my dick off all in the short amount of time it takes me to get to the bar after work on a Friday. Nothing tastes as good as baggy clothes make us feel, but no amount of likes on a fall OOTD pic is worth the buckets of boob sweat generated by this incessant heat stroke.
Halloween Decorations
EXPECTATION: This will be the year you finally give in and line your mantle with those annoying sticky webs that literally cling to everything you own. You’re so ready to go full Grandma Cromwell and deck the halls with boughs of horror—oh, and HELLO, stupidly over-priced adorbs accent pillows!
REALITY: You know when you take your headphones out of your bag after just putting them in 30 seconds ago and they’re in just as big of a clusterfuck as your life is? After going through the entire bag of web, congrats—you’ve successfully covered about three square feet of wall space in what looks like a heap of unrolled cotton balls. Stick a skull head on your table, and leave the decorating to your parents from now on.
Pumpkin Carving
EXPECTATION: Getting my friends together to do dumb activities no one cares about, like carving pumpkins, as an excuse to get shitfaced on a Wednesday is the one LinkedIn skill I pride myself in being endorsed on. The excitement of chugging pumpkin beer and watching throwbacks like Mom’s Got a Date With a Vampire while competing to see who can carve the best pumpkin without anyone asking “Wait, what is that?” is thrilling.
REALITY: Don’t get me wrong: pumpkin carving is the best—besides the part where you actually have to carve the pumpkin. It’s like painting a room: the movies make it look like it’s as exhilarating as sending a hoe-ish text at 2am, but in reality, it’s so much more than that. Three minutes into regretting trying to carve a Cheshire Cat, you’ll make the slightest wrong cut, only to knock a whole row of teeth out and fuck up the entire thing. Not only will you be stuck cleaning pumpkin goo off the table, but your jack-o-lantern will probably look like it just went on a 3-month alcohol bender and woke up with a half-opened eye and four teeth missing. Whatever, that’s why the devil invented alcohol.
Buying Candy
EXPECTATION: You hit up the Halloween aisle for the best and most frowned-upon candy and in the process, you even selflessly think to bag some up for your besties!
Side note: when tf did tiny bags of candy become so expensive? Tbh, my friends aren’t that great.
REALITY: It apparently didn’t occur to you that you either live on the 27th floor of a city complex or a tiny dorm room, and that the only children you’ll probably see all day are the ones dressed in fugly ‘90s getup in the Dannon Yogurt commercial. You’ve gotta get rid of the candy somehow, so you decide to take one for the team and experiment with the Wonka Nerds and craft your own witches brew of flavored hangover vodka, but like, it could be worse… Also, you’re welcome for that million-dollar idea.
Making Your Costume
EXPECTATION: The absolute best part of Halloween is crafting up the most original, not-too-slutty-but-pretty-fucking-slutty costume. For once, you got ahead of the game and began the planning process even before October came around. And to top it all off, you found the perfect YouTube makeup tutorial you’re about to watch like, 12 times in order to get the perfect sexy zombie bride face. No really, this is about to be some next-level shit.
REALITY: Spoiler alert: It’s October 30th. You’ve achieved nothing but an overloaded Amazon shopping cart filled with items that are 100% guaranteed to overdraft your checking account. Your party is tomorrow night, so you should probably just try Sears. Lol JK, I’m your friend, remember? You knew this would happen again, so you should really just order the best effing costume you’ve ever worn from our Betches store (yeah it’s a plug, fucking prosecute me) to save yourself time, money, and a year’s worth of embarrassment when you think about showing up in last year’s bumble bee leotard.
The Halloween Party
EXPECTATION: The night has finally arrived. You and your friends are planning on getting inappropriately drunk before arriving to the party—for precautionary purposes, of course. You’ll be sipping on whatever the fuck is in that witches brew concoction, while yelling “OMG that’s so good!” to your friend’s unoriginal Khaleesi/possibly-also-Elsa-from-Frozen getup. You managed to get that one Instagram you’re about to fully dissect and edit when you’re alone later on, so yeah, life is good.
REALITY: You show up only to lay eyes half the party wearing your typical run-of-the-mill fuckboy Halloween staple: A white tee with some sort of dumb fucking saying like “Error 404: Costume Not Found” sharpied on it. Nobody told you that a “horror” theme was actually because of your ears bleeding from hearing “Monster Mash” play on repeat 87 times. Oh, and that witches brew? I’d steer clear unless you’re into the kind of thing that is chugging the leftover middle cup ingredients from King’s Cup. But it’s ok because if all else fails, there’s always some Freeform marathon to binge while also bingeing Snickers and tequila.
Happy haunting, witches.
Dear Dedicated Transportation Industry Employee,
There are a few people that put up with my drunken bullshit. My roommates are included on this short list, but that’s only because we live together and it’s not really acceptable to leave a human blacked out on the bathroom floor alone. Especially since she drunk ate all my pizza bagels when we got back from the bar. She only did this because I was drunk crying again and she needed a snack to get her through that disaster, but pizza bagels mean a lot to a drunk betch so she owes me.
Uber drivers don’t share this kind of unspoken contract with us so the relationship we share is really a special one. Sure, we pay you (or we have our parents’ credit cards linked up to our account), but for the amount of shit we pull in the back of your cars you all really are guardian angels in disguise. Disguise being clothes probably from Target and sketchy, unmarked cars, but IDGAF—it is what it is when it comes to 3am on a Saturday.
You tolerate my 12 calls (all within 10 minutes of each other) and when I text things like, “Where the fuck are you??? Lisa is about to make out with my ex and I really need to GTFO of this party!!!!”
You pick me up three different times in one night because the girls at the first pregame I went to were sipping wine and talking about their cats when all I wanted to do was rip shots and listen to “Reflections” on repeat.
You hand me a plastic bag or a box of tissues on nights when I really should have listened to my bestie and just gone home after too much tequila during happy hour instead of ordering another round.
You allow me to squeeze “a couple extra girls” in the backseat because you understand the notion of ‘no man left behind’—especially when we have a wild postgame to hit and all of us MUST be there.
All of these sacrifices you make and disasters you DGAF about make you one of the most selfless people in my life—probably number two after my grandma who still sends me a card every month with a $50 bill in it.
Thank you for always dropping me off right outside my door, reminding me to not leave behind my phone and bag (about 5 times because I keep trying to get out of the car without them), and not judging me for that time I laid across the entire backseat and begged you to drive around in circles for 15 minutes because I was too drunk to walk.
Sincerely,
The Betches
