This post was originally published on April 30, 2014.
Oh lord, those crazy, kooky teens. They’re at it again. What won’t they do in an effort to get f*cked up? Or…more f*cked up? As f*cked up as possible?
The Bees Knees…and Eyes
NewsNet15 in Cleveland is reporting that some teenagers are now using lip balm on their eyelids to help them get more drunk and high. Huh. No, we don’t get it either. But apparently the trend is nicknamed “Beezin,” because obviously the only kind of lip balm the kids will use on their delicate lids is the natural beeswax kind by Burt’s Bees.
Reportedly there have been YouTube videos dedicated to this odd phenomenon for the past year, though “beezin” first showed up on UrbanDictionary in 2010. The practice is simple: Just smear the waxy shit all over your eyelids, then watch as it somehow magically enhances the already awesome sensation of being wasted. Some kids skip the “getting higher” claim, saying it simply “helps keep them alert.”
Other Highlights of Modern Teendom
Maybe this odd trend (if it exists?) isn’t so odd, though, when you consider the overall cultural trajectory of dumb things that dumb teens supposedly love to do, which the dumb media then loves to freak out about. Earlier this month, everyone got their panties in a twist over the purported new teen coffee-smoking trend (which may or may not actually, you know, exist; we’re leaning toward not).
There was a mini-furor back in 2012 when HuffPo reported that teens were soaking gummy bears in alcohol to get drunk without their parents or teachers knowing. WACKY ALCOHOLIC TEENAGERS GONE BERSERK!
Oh, and that tampon-soaking story! Remember that? The one that dizzily claimed that some Super-Wacky Alcoholic Teenage Girls Gone Wild were using, yep, vodka-soaked tampons to get sloshed without letting on, and IT COULD EVEN BE FATAL!!! One adolescent psychiatrist even decided to speak publicly on the matter, blindly risking her reputation to comment on a trend that didn’t actually seem to happen: “Participants get intoxicated a lot faster because it gets absorbed directly into their blood stream,” she asserted. The best website ever, Snopes.com, went on to helpfully debunk that bullshit, writing, “We haven’t encountered a single documented case of anyone actually engaging in such a practice.”
Newsworthy Teenage Antics?
Of course, there are the occasional salacious news reports that are based on real events, like that horrible teen choking game that blew up in 2013, which teens did, sadly, die from. And the whole cinammon challenge thingy.
In any case, it probably goes without saying that many teens pretty universally enjoy getting messed up and experimenting with altered states. In some ways it’s a rite of passage. Do I believe that’s a cause for alarm? Sometimes. But do I buy 75 percent of the news stories I read about these supposed adolescent “trends,” “phenomenons,” or “epidemics”? No way. Whether you should buy ’em is entirely your call.
Courtesy of WestportWiki (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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