Hot Slut Of The Day!
LA Gear’s LA Lights!
LA Gear was one of the IT shoes of my childhood, and while I may have had a bootleg pair of LA Gears (and they were probably called LA-Adjacent Gears), I was mostly a British Knights kind of trick. I was international like that. But for many, LA Gear was an ultimate status symbol for their feet, and in the early-90s, LA Gear really brought the technologically-advanced opulence when they introduced LA Lights. If a pair of LA Gear won the lottery and blew all their winnings on sparkly jewelry to let everyone know what a rich bitch they are, they’d look exactly like a pair of LA Lights. Yes, LA Lights were the fancy, bougie, show-off cousin of LA Gear.
LA Lights came out in 1992, and they immediately became the must-have shoe for children who like to flaunt the flashiness on the playground. LA Lights was a line of sneakers with LED lights in its soles. Wikipedia says that at the time, a pair of LA Lights sold for $50. The Week says that before LA Lights came out, LA Gear had been hit with reports of their sneakers being low-quality trash, and the sneakers literally fell apart when college basketball players wore them during games. So LA Gear needed a win and LA Lights was their win. In just one year, five million pairs of LA Lights were sold, because kids wanted their feets to annoyingly light up with every step. Here’s a commercial from the 90s, which shows a kid murdering the sun so his and his friend’s LA Lights can shine!
I asked for a pair of LA Lights for Christmas one year but my mom never got them for me. What she should’ve done is just get me a pair of used sneakers from Goodwill, tape some Christmas lights to the sole, plug ’em in and tell me that I can’t walk too far or the plug will pop out. My mom may have been doing me a favor by not getting me some of those gimmicky foot jewels. Because LA Lights turned out to be DEADLY since they contained mercury! via The Week:
For the first two, most popular years of L.A. Lights sales, every pair contained a not-insignificant amount of mercury. The metal, which is liquid at room temperature and toxic to humans, was used in the small tilt switches that powered the built-in LEDs. With every step, the mercury in the switch completed a circuit and produced the blinking effect. It was an extremely reliable and long-lasting design, but it was also dangerous and added an unwanted legal angle to shoe-buying.
That little poisonous tidbit caused parents to ban LA Lights and Minnesota also made the sales of LA Lights illegal and banned distribution of them. LA Gear paid fines and took out the mercury from the sneakers, which caused the light-up function to not work as well. LA Gear ended up filing for bankruptcy in 1998. They’ve tried to make a comeback over the years, including teaming up with Tyga (pronounced: UGH) in 2015 for a pair of LA Lights designed by him.
Of course, LA Lights weren’t and are not the only sneakers that sing, “Weeeee light up your feeeet,” but because they had mercury in them, they were the perfect shoes for total badasses who liked to live on the edge. So if I ever see some kid wearing light-up sneakers, I’m going to say, “Cool shoes, but do they have a non-insignificant amount of mercury in them? They don’t? Pfft, what a wuss!”