The Shiny Aluminum Ball Fad Is Being Taken Advantage Of By Pranksters

In today's day and age, misinformation spreads faster than wildfire. Remember the Tide pod days and how the company literally had to urge its customers not to stick the cleaning detergent in their mouths? No matter how tasty (what?) they might appear.

So it comes as a surprise to no one that people are once again being careless and crazy on the internet. This time it doesn't have to do with detergent, though. 

If you haven't seen it, there is currently a trend circulating in which people take an enormous amount of aluminum foil, form it into a ball, and slowly, methodically pound it down and sand it until it is a perfect shiny sphere:

It's an intensely laborious, painstaking process that takes a lot of time, and presumably can only be completed by someone who has nothing better to do with their lives than work hard to achieve something that looks like a silver ball. To play bocci ball, maybe?

But where there is a trend, there is someone looking to spread mischief. In fact, a couple people are trying to spread the rumor that you can have a perfect, shiny foil ball without all the work and patience.

It's really insanely simple. So simple it's almost crazy it hasn't become a meme decades ago. People wanted to troll the poor folk who didn't have time to patiently sand their aluminum foil balls into just throwing their useless prop into the microwave.

It should come as a surprise to no one that people are trying to troll others into performing dangerous activities at home. I mean, have you heard of the internet? Have you seen any of the dangerous viral challenges that have landed people in the hospital?

But because the internet is what it is, it's also not too shocking that people are trying the advice they were given, and actually sticking their balls of aluminum foil in their microwaves. Which, I'm not sure if anyone let you know when you were, say, five years old, is a very very terrible, no good idea.

Of course, people are probably joking and just Googled "broken microwave pics."

But it still seems important to warn people: DO NOT PUT FOIL IN THE MICROWAVE.

Don't do it. No matter how much you want something shiny.

Really though, DON'T DO IT.