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Covid-Friendly Wearable Shocks You With 450 Volts When You Touch Your Face
Pavlok in a pandemic
Instagram has a delightful ability to surprise me with ads for pointless objects I absolutely can’t live without. A little box that sanitizes my keys with a blast of UV light? Yes! A subscription plan for growing micro-broccoli? Why wasn’t I informed sooner?? A meal delivery service whose products appear to consist exclusively of colorful liquids in fancy glass bottles? Sign me up!
Recently, though, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw an ad for a product that I almost couldn’t believe: the Pavlok.
The ad features a GIF of a person wearing a Fitbit-style wristband, with the text “Eliminate Cravings.” Across the frame from their hand sits a giant slice of cake. As the person reaches towards the cake, the wristband turns red and zaps them with electricity. You can tell it’s zapping them because the whole frame vibrates, and little lightning bolts shoot out of the wristband, like in an old-school Batman movie. All that’s missing is an animated “POW!”
