From Peace, Love, Unity, Respect to Plastic on Your Wrist

The kandi bracelet was born under the strobe lights of early 1990s Southern California raves. What started as cheap pony beads strung into neon cuffs became a handshake ritual of PLUR — Peace, Love, Unity, Respect. DJ Frankie Bones hollered the phrase in 1993 at a Brooklyn rave to stop a fight, and the words stuck like gum to the dance floor. Suddenly, trading plastic bracelets wasn’t just decoration; it was communion.

Of course, like all human rituals, it had a double edge. Early ravers whispered that beads were also dealer signals. By the late ’90s, the “Kandi Kid” aesthetic was solidified: Day-Glo arms stacked to the elbows, a friendly subculture claiming purity while shuffling in sweat-soaked warehouses.

Fast-forward to 2022: Taylor Swift drops a lyric — “So make the friendship bracelets” — and an entirely different fandom starts trading beaded messages at stadium concerts. No, she didn’t invent kandi. The rave kids did that decades earlier, in the glow-stick trenches. But the Swifties mainstreamed it, sanitized it, and carried it into suburban arenas.

The Invisible Beads: Germs and Chemicals.

Here’s where it gets less cute. A Florida Atlantic University study found that 95% of worn plastic wristbands harbored bacteria, including Staphylococcus aureus and E. coli. Plastic, it turns out, is a bacterial Airbnb. Toss in the sweaty, saliva-smeared ritual of swapping kandi and you’ve got a portable germ exchange program.

And then there’s the plastic itself. Cheap beads are often made from acrylic, PVC, or worse: recycled e-waste plastics dyed with heavy-metal pigments. Mardi Gras bead studies have found lead, brominated flame retardants, and antimony embedded in the plastic. Add sweat, friction, and hours of dancing, and those toxins can leach into skin. BPA and phthalates — common additives — mimic hormones and have been linked to endocrine disruption.

In other words: your bracelet isn’t just glowing with “unity.” It’s glowing with potential microbe colonies and industrial leftovers.

Raves as Unwitting Laboratories.

Now zoom out. A rave is, biologically speaking, a giant uncontrolled experiment. Thousands of people pressed together, breathing heavy, shouting over subwoofers — the perfect petri dish. Epidemiologists call these superspreading events. The Boston Biogen conference, the French choir outbreak, the Delta-filled summer festivals — all case studies in how one night of music can redraw the transmission map of a virus.

But here’s the nuance: crowded raves don’t evolve viruses on purpose. They just create millions of replication events, increasing the odds that a mutation already present will catch a lucky break. Most new mutations die in the bottleneck between hosts. Still, with enough bodies in motion, chance favors persistence.

Contrast that with gain-of-function research in laboratories. There, scientists serially passage viruses in animals or engineer genomes, applying artificial selection to deliberately enhance traits like transmissibility. It’s controlled, contained (ideally), and intentional. Raves are the opposite: chaotic, sweaty, uncontained — natural selection at warp speed, but without precision.

Fishy or Just Human?

Is there something “fishy” going on? Only if you squint at humanity itself. Raves and labs mirror each other in uncomfortable ways. One creates ritualized plastic exchanges that spread bacteria and maybe a few phthalates. The other manipulates genomes behind sealed glass. Both flirt with viral destiny.

The real difference: labs select, raves amplify. One is an engineered stress test, the other a human petri dish. Neither are “safe,” both tell us something about the fragility of our world.

And here’s the kicker: world peace — the thing we dream of when we string beads spelling “LOVE” — won’t come from ignoring these truths. It comes from acknowledging how deeply we’re entangled with our environment, our plastics, our microbes, and each other.