Baffled Adults Reveal The Weirdest Teen Trends They've Seen

And sometimes kids today... it's hard to watch. There are so many new developments in society that even those of us who were teenagers less than a decade ago tend to struggle dealing with this new wave of teens.

So when u/HugeTortoise151 asked:

Adults of reddit, what is the strangest teen trend you have seen?

We were all curious to know the answers.

Getting a "smiley"

Flame up a Bic lighter for a good few minutes until the metal shield is as hot as it's going to get.

Then hold out your arm and someone presses it into your skin.

How long you kept it there, how big the blister then scar was a badge of honour. I didn't move my arm. 15 years later and I can still see the "smiley" face scar, it's faded enough nobody would know.

I came from a very depressed part of the UK.

When I was a teen, 90s, coloring your hair with kool-aid. My brother went to school with half tropical berry and half fruit punch or half lime green.

In middle school we would fold paper into these thick wedges and use rubber bands to shoot that at each other. We called them "hornets". Our folding skills and material choices became so elevated that a kid got hit in the neck and it left a massive welt. Another kit got hit in the eye and had to go to the doctor.

The school banned folding paper and rubber bands....

When I was in high school (late 90s), there was this trend for people to take the wrappers from Big Red cinnamon flavored gum, soak them with their own saliva and then stick it on their forehead and rub until it gave them a rectangular cinnamon burn on their forehead. It was bizarre.

In the 90's when kids at school would knock each other out. Not by fighting, but by squeezing someone's chest until they passed out. Kids would volunteer themselves. I seen a girl have a seizure and another one fall and hit her head, only to wake up giggling.

Smoking smarties was popular back in my middle school.

When I was in high school (2002-2006ish) I had multiple friends take some salt. Lick part of their arm, sprinkle the salt and then hold an ice cube to that for as long as they could. Had a friend practically give herself frost bite and ended up with a giant "burn mark".

There were a lot of teens in the 90's that thought wearing and sucking on pacifiers was really cool.

A game called quarters. A test of pain tolerance I believe. Place your fist, knuckles flat against the surface of the table, while another participant shoots a quarter by force of his thumb as hard and as fast as he can via downward force applied to the quarter.

I still don't know where the cool S came from...

When I was in 5th grade, back in 06-07 all the girls would walk around and punch each other in the boob. We'd yell "I just gave you breast cancer" as we did it. We had to have a huge meeting a couple weeks later with all the girls in 5th grade where the female teachers were telling us how inappropriate and idiotic it was...

I'm honestly not sure if this happened anywhere else besides my home town..

We played something called "the dart game" in high school.

You'd say somebody's name and if they looked and made eye contact you pretended like you were shooting them with a blow dart gun. They would then have to fall to the floor motionless until somebody pulled the invisible dart out of their neck.

I thought the Macarena was the strangest thing ever as a kid. That or that dance move where you grab your ankle and act like a hammer or something.

In junior high (around 93-94), it was cool for a few months to walk up to your friends and pick them up by their heads. The administration finally stepped in and made an announcement banning it because obviously you could break someone's neck doing that. I have no idea how or why that became cool but it felt like everyone was doing it.

The eraser challenge where you rub an eraser against your arm until it burns your flesh.

More among tweens than teens (think 4-6th graders).

Been seeing a lot of Cat Ears. Not just little wire ones, either. Holographic ones, fake fur ones. They're wearing them in public places, like museums, stores, parks, trains. It's not necessarily bad but it is a little weird.

The one where girls tried to make their lips bigger (aka swollen and disfigured) with everything from bottles to vacuum cleaners. Wtf? Honestly, wtf?

The way girls squat in pictures. As if they're making room to not block the face of the non-existent girl standing behind them.

I'm a high school teacher, so I've seen everything from the parted-down-the-middle penis head haircuts of the mid 90s to the whole emo thing to those fidget spinners that were popular last year, but the weirdest trend I've seen was the Juggalo/ ICP fans of 2006+.

Back in 2015-2016, there was this challenge where people would try to make themselves pass out. You'd hold your breath and blow air out with heavy breaths. Someone actually died (not from my school) from it because you can completely deprive your brain of oxygen and my school gave suspensions to some of my friends that tried it and anyone else that tried it

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