Dangerous and dumb: Another teen challenge
Murky facts of ‘deodorant challenge’ and other trendy ‘crazes’
A mother in Britain was furious: Her daughter’s arm was maimed with a nasty, blistery burn. And the burn was thanks to something called the “deodorant challenge.”
So the mom did what many parents might do in 2018: She warned the internet about it.
“For any parents who have children, please, please sit them down and show them these pictures ... These are the damaging results of something known as the deodorant challenge,” Jamie Prescott recently wrote on Facebook. Prescott said the challenge was “literally involves spraying deodorant on to someone else for as long as possible.”
The damage caused by the deodorant challenge is real. It comes not from the deodorant itself, but from the delivery method. An aerosol spray cools quickly on the skin, essentially producing frostbite. The result can be, essentially, a burn, according to a cautionary post from the University of Utah. The longer the spray on the skin, the worse the damage.
The post has more than 4,000 shares on Facebook, and has become the main source for a wave of news articles warning about a dumb thing teens were doing.
Dumb and dangerous online teen challenges are repeat visitors to the news cycle. And they bring with them a whole world of factual murkiness. In this case, as in many others, the challenge itself appears to be real, and dangerous. But there’s little definitive evidence that it has actually gone viral among teenagers in Britain or elsewhere on social media. Instead, the thing that trends is often the warning about the challenge.
Google Trends shows search interest climbing for “deodorant challenge” after Prescott’s warning started getting media attention, with relatively little interest before that. The search term previously peaked in search interest in 2017, when the last panic about the challenge spread through the news. Britain’s ITV called it the “social media craze that’s burning children’s’ skin,” and
interviewed a mother and daughter about it back then. The mother posted a picture of her daughter’s burns to Facebook. The daughter said she tried the challenge because her friends were doing it.
Similarly, Prescott’s daughter, Ellie, heard about the challenge from her friends. But the connection to a currently viral teen social media challenge is unproven.
There’s not a ton of research on
the phenomenon. One study, published in the scientific journal Burns and Trauma in 2016, traced cases of cold burns at a regional burn unit in Britain for an 11-year period. The researchers found that of the 11,468 burn patients treated at the centre during the study period, a total of 23 of them were cold burns.
However, research did find some evidence that a small number of kids were trying this, whether because of the challenge or otherwise. On YouTube, there are some videos of kids showing their injuries from the challenge going back five years, but none seem to have gone “viral” — their view counts are in the low thousands.
Basically, the deodorant challenge is real, but the warnings appear to be more viral than the challenge itself.
And it’s hardly the only teen challenge to be propelled into the news cycle in this way. Remember the Tide Pod Challenge? That was probably the most popular meme of 2018 for adults who want to mock dumb teens — even though it was reported that laundry pod poisonings are actually trending downward.