• From wearing your pants around your ankles to ¬¬¬¬¬¬setting yourself on fire, we
count ten of the dumbest things that became trends!
10 – Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge, • Kardashian fans desperately want plump
lips like their idol Kylie Jenner – and they were willing to go to some crazy lengths
to get them.
• The Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge is a viral craze where participants squeeze their lips
into a shotglass, suck out all the air out and then look on in horror as their lips puff
up to roughly three times their normal size.
• It sounds stupid – I mean harmless – enough, but it’s actually pretty dangerous.
You see, Kylie Jenner achieved this look by using comparatively safe temporary lip fillers.
The shotglass method, on the other hand, can cause severe bruising and even permanent scarring
or disfigurement!
A lot of people who did this tore blood vessels, so y’know don’t do this.
Appreciate your lips!
They’re what separates us from birds.
9 – The Knockout Game, • This one definitely requires a ‘don’t
try this at home’ disclaimer.
The Knockout Game is a disgusting game where assholes post footage of themselves punching
out unsuspecting strangers.
• The ‘game’ is to see if you can knock victims out with just one punch.
The most disturbing part is the attackers aren’t even doing it to rob them; they’re
only doing it solely to become famous on the internet.
• Victims have included women and the elderly, and several lives have been lost because of
this messed up game.
8 – Salt and Ice Challenge, • Not many people would consider burning
themselves fun, but apparently enough do to start a sad little internet trend.
• It’s called the Salt and Ice Challenge and it involves putting salt on your skin,
then holding an ice cube to it.
The idea is to film yourself as you scream in pain.
Sounds fun, right?
The ‘game’ comes from seeing how long you can last.
• As anyone with more than twelve brain cells would know, this game is dangerous.
It can cause first degree burns, infection and potentially even permanent damage to muscles
and bones.
One boy held ice on his back for a couple of minutes and received blistering burns that
took all summer to heal.
His whole life became a cycle of taking antibiotics and applying lotion.
7 – The Harlem Shake, • Moving away from dumb asses hurting themselves,
let’s check out the Harlem Shake: a short-lived internet dance craze where people tried to
become famous by spazzing out on camera.
• Basically a song plays while participants stand around acting normal.
Then the beat drops and everything just becomes chaos!
People jump and thrash around, popping and pivoting their shoulders, and then weird stuff
drops into frame.
Y’know, like Mario having a dance-off with Goomba .
• Everyone took to YouTube to show off whatever version they’d cooked up and then they all
woke up with Harlem Shake hangovers and were like, ‘Wait a minute…
This is really dumb’. 6 – Sagging Pants,
• In the late Nineties, the smell of revolution was in the air.
Young guys threw their belts in the trash and said ‘No more!
From today we’ll wear our pants around our ankles!’
Okay, so it wasn’t that low – was more the upper thigh – but they definitely weren’t
wearing them around their waists like they were supposed to!
• Sagging pants are one of the most hated fashion trends in the world.
This trend originated in prison and was a pretty common sight in gang culture.
• The fashion crime bothers people so much that New Jersey recently passed a law against
it.
If you wear your pants too low in Penns Grove you could be fined up to $1,000.
That’s rough.
You could buy like three hundred belts with that.
5 – Cinnamon Challenge, • Cinnamon is a tasty baking addition with
many health benefits, but did you know that it can also kill you?
Ingesting raw cinnamon can potentially cause respiratory problems and even fatal lung damage.
• Choking in front of an online audience doesn’t seem like something that would make
for a good trend, but thousands of people did this under the guise of participating
in ‘the Cinnamon Challenge’.
The challenge involved eating a tablespoon of cinnamon at once.
It pretty much made anyone who did it gasp for air and cough up clouds of cinnamon dust.
Many people ended up in hospital because of this.
• The craze has wound down now, but it shouldn’t have been a thing in the first place.
Baking delicious treats would make a better trend.
4 – Duck Face, • This one isn’t dangerous like some of
the other trends, but it’s still really annoying.
Duck facing is when a person – usually a young woman – blows an exaggerated kiss
to the camera when they’re taking a selfie.
• When pressed together, the person’s lips look like a duck’s bill.
It’s a harmless phenomenon, but pouting instead of smiling is a great way to ruin
a photo.
• Plus duck facing is like the secret handshake of modern narcissists.
3 – Planking, • For awhile there planking was a certified
phenomenon.
People from all over the world shared pictures of themselves laying like planks of woods
on just about any surface you can think of.
• The idea was to shock and entertain people by planking in strange and unlikely locations.
The whole thing took off because virtually anyone could do it, and because it gave people
a way to exercise their creativity.
• Although planking was relatively harmless, there were of course people who took it too
far.
Many risked their lives by planking in unsafe locations, like on ledges or balconies.
The trend was met with a lot of fierce criticism, but plankers refused to take this, err, lying
down… 2 – Sex Bracelets,
• In the 2000s, horny schoolkids wore different coloured bracelets to advertise what sex acts
they were comfortable performing.
• In the game, which was called Snap, kids tried to break other kids’ bracelets to
earn sexual favours.
Different coloured bracelets corresponded to different sex acts.
So, for instance, if you’d finished your lunch early and felt like a blowjob you’d
have to seek out someone wearing a purple bracelet before the bell rang.
• The whole thing was like this secret code operating right under parents’ and teachers’
noses.
• 1 – Fire Challenge, • Is there no limit to the stupid things
people are willing to do for Internet fame?
The Fire Challenge takes the already very stupid principle behind the Salt and Ice Challenge
and turns it up to eleven.
• In this sick internet craze, participants douse themselves in alcohol or gasoline and
literally set themselves on fire.
Why?
The same reason anyone does stupid things these days: to impress a few strangers on
the internet.
Obviously hundreds of people ended up with serious life-altering burns, and a fifteen-year-old
actually died.
• Really, this is just natural selection at its finest.
What’s next?
The fucking Russian Roulette Challenge?
Come on, human race.
Get it together!