You may have heard of the dangerous new trend we just made up: Bear Bleaching. Bear Bleaching is the risky practice of finding a wild brown bear and bleaching its fur to make it look more like a Polar Bear. But are teenagers trying this potentially life-threatening new fad? No, not that we know of!
If you’re the parent of a teen, you’re no stranger to the harmful trends – from Tide Pods to “planking” – that threaten the safety of today’s malleable youth. Young people have always dealt with social pressure to fit in and win the approval of their peers, but today’s teens face the added strain of vying for acclaim on social media. Is this insatiable desire for attention and praise leading teens to head out into bear country, finding a vulnerable grizzly bear, and lightly brushing bleach onto its fur until it ultimately kills and eats you? No. It isn’t.
It’s no secret that teens love grizzlies. I mean, we think? So it doesn’t seem so crazy that teens would be finding grizzly bears, temporarily knocking them out with tranquilizers so they can bleach their fur and posting the whole thing on Instagram, right? We thought this sounded plausible. And it could really be happening, but again, it’s not.
So why are teens willing to endanger themselves just to attempt this trend that we just created? The short answer is: They’re not.
15-year-old Luke Marshall granted some insight on the perilous and very not-real trend.
“I don’t get it,” said Marshall. “You made up this trend but you want to know if I’ve tried it? No. The answer is obviously no.”
Another teen, Hannah Murphy, weighed in on Bear Bleaching and how teens are locating unbleached bears.
“What bears?” said Murphy. “I have no idea what Bear Bleaching is. I came here to talk about gun control.”
Their responses may be disheartening but young people have always required an outlet to release their excess energy and establish their identities, and we’re pretty sure that current outlet is the 100 percent made up trend called Bear Bleaching.
At the end of the day, we have a lot of respect for teens. And the point we’re making is that we will do literally anything to make them our friends. Like, we’ll bleach a bear, okay? Just let us know.
