Labiaplasty, vodka tampons and more scary teen ‘trends’ your kids are sick of hearing about

Labiaplasty (vaginal rejuvenation) isn’t a new trend, but until recently we weren’t aware that teenagers were flocking in droves to cosmetic surgery clinics to get their external genitalia trimmed. Except, um, they’re not. Yes, 400 girls of 18 and younger had the surgery in 2015, but that’s 400, not 400,000.

Eyeballing used to be what your nosy neighbor did over the garden fence — until 2010, when our attention was drawn to the student trend of pouring their tipple of choice into their eye instead of down their throat. The idea is that the alcohol gets absorbed into the system through the mucus membrane, resulting in a super-quick buzz and the risk of fast, permanent eye damage. Luckily there doesn’t seem to be an influx of teenagers wearing pirate patches, so this was less of a trend and more of a really stupid idea.

After The Wall Street Journal ran an article warning parents of a faux-smoking craze, whereby teenagers crushed candy into a fine powder and used the cellophane wrappers as bootleg rolling papers, breathing in the powder and mimicking a smoker’s exhale by blowing out the fine dust. The reality is that this “trend” didn’t seem to catch on beyond a Frisco, Colorado, middle school and a smattering of YouTube how-to videos. We’re pretty sure nobody suffered any injuries more serious than the occasional Smartie getting lodged somewhere it shouldn’t be.

Teens need to be taught about the importance of condoms, but the challenge they face is how to use one to protect from STDs and pregnancy, not how to snort it through their nose and pull it out of their mouth. A handful of teens took the condom challenge, while the vast majority of their peers and the rest of the world just watched them in sheer horror.

A jelly bracelet around your teen’s wrist doesn’t mean she’s getting it on with all the boys in your neighborhood. Bear that in mind before panicking about the sex bracelet trend that resurfaces every few years. It’s been speculated that the different colors of the bracelets represent different sexual acts the wearer is willing to engage in or has already ticked off their list. It’s much more likely that your teen just likes wearing bracelets.

If you’re looking for recent evidence of the #CellophaneSelfie trend that made our jaws drop in 2014, good luck. Presumably it didn’t take long for teenagers witnessing someone wrapping their face tightly in packaging tape to realize how ridiculous this is (and how painful it would be to do the unwrapping). 

It was only a matter of time before someone came up with a way to use technology to get high. The result is a phenomenon called I-dosing, which tries to use sounds to alter consciousness. Teens can plug in their headphones and listen to tracks designed to re-create the high of specific drugs. Some teens may try this out of curiosity, but authentic reports that it actually works are thin on the ground, and so far there’s no link between I-dosing and smoking crack. 

Also known as “butt chugging,” back in 2011, teens were apparently inserting vodka-soaked tampons into their rectums as a cunning way to get smashed without their parents knowing about it. One school resource officer said that “this is everywhere,” but no specific cases of alcohol poisoning in butt-chugging teens have been reported.

Not all bizarre crazes should be believed. After a warning issued to Florida police about a new drug threat went public, the internet struggled to accept that people were sniffing fermented raw sewage, a concoction known as Jenkem. There’s ew, and then there’s ewwww. It later came to light that the reported use of Jenkem was faked using flour, water, beer and Nutella. “I never inhaled any poop gas and got high off it,” confirmed the “user.” 

Parties are a rite of passage for every teenager — and their parents. So many concerns… Who are they with? Will they make curfew? Are they drinking? Having sex? As if that’s not enough, the rainbow party trend was enough to tip any parent of a teen from regular worrying to full-blown panic. As detailed in Paul Ruditis’ novel for teenagers of the same name, a rainbow party is a group oral sex party, in which every girl wears a different shade of lipstick, and each guy tries to “collect” as many colors as possible by the end of the night. Fortunately rainbow parties haven’t seemed to cause as much of a stir in real life as they did in the book.