Name: Acne lights.
Age: Adolescent.
Appearance: Pink, unflattering.
Nonsense! Pink can suit a wide range of skin tones and lend an outfit éclat. Firstly, you are not a fashion journalist.
Right so far. Secondly, we are not talking about pink accessories, but pink light, which emphasises any spots and blemishes on your skin.
Ah, yes. Very little éclat from problem skin. But aren’t pink lights quite easy to avoid? They have been installed deliberately in a few places.
Like McDonald’s? The lights in there are very unflattering. No. Purpose-built acne lights are even worse. They were considered for public areas of Preston in 2006 and Cardiff in 2012, and were actually installed in a Mansfield housing estate in 2009.
Why? Are the residents of Preston, Cardiff and Mansfield just too damn attractive? I don’t believe that was the problem, no. The lights are intended to deter teenagers, who are often blighted by acne, from loitering.
They seem happy enough in McDonald’s, but I guess chips are worth looking ugly for. You bet they are. And I’m sure McDonald’s is happy to have them. Residents in other places blame teenagers for antisocial behaviour, though. Drug-dealing, heavy petting, floss dancing, and so forth.
Acne lights don’t sound exactly pro-social, to be honest. No. That’s why the children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, now wants to ban them. They “play on the worst adolescent fears and insecurities about image and looks”, she told the Telegraph.
I would say other people are the root cause of that. True, but we can’t ban them. Longfield also condemned “mosquito alarms” as similarly “cruel and demeaning”.
Anything that repels mosquitos has my full support. I am afraid it’s just a box that emits an intolerable high-pitched whine only audible to young people. Campaigners in Scotland got them removed from train stations in 2017.
I would have thought that Scottish weather was nature’s anti-loitering device. There are always a few nice days.
Can’t they blast out dreary classical music? Isn’t that more civilised? It is, but you can’t do it all the time in public.
Tsk. So what will the nation’s teenagers do once they are free to gather on the streets again? Play games on their phones and bully each other on WhatsApp, I expect.
Do say: “It is cruel to exploit teens’ self-consciousness.”
Don’t say: “Proactiv+ will clear that up.”
