Twenty two years ago Cardelli et al. published their seminal paper on Galactic extinction laws. In the first part of my talk I will explore that (often quoted but also often misunderstood) paper and detail its strengths and weaknesses. In the second part I will describe the two datasets that have finally allowed the Cardelli et al. laws to be tested to their limit and I will present a new family of extinction laws derived from the new data that do a better job in describing extinction in the optical range.