I Tried Beezin & Lived To Tell The Tale

I did it because all the cool teens were doing it. And you guys, I regret it. Yes, that's right: I'm talking about beezin, the peppermint oil sensation that's (not really) sweeping teen nation. I'm here to be a cautionary tale, a tale of a lip balm misused and two eyelids spurned. On Wednesday, I beezed, and I'll never beez again.

It all started when my mom bought me a shirt in middle school with a giant bee on the front. Around the bee, in large letters, the shirt told everyone who had the pleasure of seeing me to "Just Bee Yourself!" This is a shirt I wore a lot. I had lots of friends in middle school.

So long story short, I wear my bee shirt, Burt's Bees becomes incredibly popular, and at some point, something goes wrong. Namely, in 2014, the Kids Start Beezin. I already had a propensity for seizing on bee trends. This, I thought, was the next step in my evolution toward Peak Bee. I read an article about how teens were beezin, supposedly to get high; I ran upstairs and grabbed that cylindrical yellow tube full of beeswax and the promise of slightly less-chapped lips; and then I unscrewed the cap.

"Don't," my roommate said. "That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard of."

"I'm going to do it," I replied dangerously, moving the Burt's Bees toward my unsullied lids.

"Get out of my room," she responded, reasonably.

Heeding none of her pleas, nor the warnings of Fox Affiliate KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, I went ahead and applied the Burt's Bees to my eyelids, and nothing happened. (Here I'll note that I was acting of my own idiotic accord, and not at the behest of Bustle or with the benefit of any conscious thought whatsoever.) After a couple of minutes I began to feel a very slight tingling sensation, but other that that, there was none of what KOKH said I would feel when it published its groundbreaking journalism on the trend on April 21:

A quick search on Youtube and Twitter shows "beezin" is picking up steam. Those who are into it say it has the effects of feeling drunk or high. Others say it helps keep them alert.

Internet, this case is settled: I can hereby say with authority that beezin does not have any of the above-mentioned effects. I did not feel drunk, or high, or alert. I felt like kind of an idiot, rubbed it off my eyes, and went to bed. I concluded that I am not into beezin. Story over, right?

Wrong. In the morning I woke as I usually do, bounding out of bed like a gazelle and rushing to greet the day (translation: snoozing eight times and grousing over to the mirror to put my contacts in). I placed the first contact in my left eye and was immediately greeted by an intense burning sensation. A fluke, I thought. I'm sure it'll stop burning momentarily. That's when I put the other contact in, at which point both eyes started burning painfully and I quickly realized it was going to be a glasses day.

What is going on here? I wondered like an idiot, before getting into my car to drive to the office, because I am an adult, and not a teenager or a college student with time on my hands to face the consequences of putting Burt's Bees on my eyelids. I got a few blocks before I realized it was awfully bright out, and actually I couldn't really see, so I turned around and went home to sit in the blissful dark. It took me an hour or so to realize the culprit was recreationally beezin, and another hour after that before I decided to Google "how to get peppermint oil out of your eyes."

So in the end, I spent part of my afternoon pouring milk over my eyes, which fixed the problem but doesn't undo the fact that I spent part of my afternoon pouring milk over my eyes. That's time I can never get back. Don't beez, kids.