More Bug Stuff

Last time we sold these things, @GospelX said:

I’ve got a young teen. Sold!

This would be the typical sales pitch. They’re pimple patches, after all. And who do pimples impact more than anyone? The youth. Hence, they’re for teens.

And yes, this marketing narrows the range of potential consumers, but in this case, it’s actually pretty smart. Because if you cast too wide a net, things get muddled. What else would you even call them? Bump covers? Raised skin reducers? Pimples are the main thing they’re used for, so it makes sense to push that angle.

Yet, the truth is, they’re just some little hydrocolloid patches. They cover, they pull the gunk out, and protect the area from your fingers.

In that case, they’re great not just for pimples but also for ingrown hairs.

And @Echenanci points out another potential use case:

These are great on bug bites as well…

This, in particular, caught my eye, because just recently, I ate dinner on the back deck with my family. It was one of those perfect nights. Sunny but with a few cottony clouds in the sky, not too warm, a pleasant breeze, the cicadas singing. A little late summer magic.

But we weren’t the only ones eating.

While we enjoyed our meal, the mosquitoes enjoyed theirs. And their meal was us.

It’s so annoying, isn’t it? Because sometimes you don’t even know a mosquito has been on you until you get inside later and find a severely itchy bump on the side of your calf.

In my estimation, however, mosquitoes are actually not the worst tiny bug to get bitten by. As summer transitions into fall, a new, even more obnoxious adversary emerges from the cornfields.

“Minute pirate bugs are definitely a case of good bug gone bad,” University of Nebraska entomologist Jonathan Larson said.

This is from a 2017 article on KETV Omaha’s site. Why are they good? Because they feast on other little bugs like aphids that negatively affect crops. And why are they bad? Because, come harvest time, they leave the farms and head to our backyards to issue some incredibly nasty bites, especially given their speck-small size. The result is an itchy red welt (for many people; some have no reaction).

What’s funny is, apparently, they’re not aggressive, per se, just confused.

“They’re not eating you, they’re not injecting you with anything, they’re just trying to decipher what it is they’ve landed on,” Larson said.

Still, they hurt like hell.

But maybe these things can help with the bites.

Or maybe they won’t.

Still, you do get 144 of them for pretty cheap, so we say it’s worth a try.