Snap Bracelets: Fun Isn't Supposed to Be Safe

[originally written for overtimecomedy.com on 1/26/07]


If you’re feeling a lack of fulfillment as an adult, it may possibly extend from the fact that you didn’t own a snap bracelet when you were a kid. It was an accessory, yes, but you could wear it and have fun at the same time. With watches, even swatches, you have to find a table or something to rest the watch face on while you fasten the buckle or Velcro. Snap bracelets, you just snap, and bam, you’re wearing a bracelet.

Before snap bracelets, I didn’t even know I wanted to wear bracelets. My sister had a girly zebra striped one, but mine was yellow, pink, and blue camouflage. That’s right, if I were covered in alien vomit, my wrist would be totally undetectable.

Snap bracelets could do tricks. I would roll down both sides and turn it into opera glasses, or I could roll down one side and it’d be a pipe. Oooh, or I could lay it down flat and press in the middle to make it pop into the air. It had to do tricks; it wasn’t a very comfortable bracelet.

Then the safety Nazis in the government, with their boo hoo safety warnings came out and said the metal in the bracelet could rip out and slit your wrist.

Oh snap, government. Oh snap.

When I was a kid, I would sneak out into the woods with a 30-year-old piece of rope, tie it to a flimsy tree branch and swing around like Tarzan. I didn’t get hurt once, but apparently when faced with the choice between playing with sharp metal near my wrist or not, I’m not capable of making that call on my own. Fuck that. My friends and I decided to stick it to the man. The day right after all those warnings came off, we tore the cool covers off our snap bracelets and wore the bare metal to school, as an organized protest to their candy ass safety policy.

The next day, snap bracelets were banned permanently.