Slap bracelets went from a shop teacher’s side project to a nationwide school ban in less time than it takes most toys to reach peak popularity. Inventor Stuart Anders, a Wisconsin industrial arts teacher, developed the bendable, self-wrapping bracelet and licensed it through Main Street Toy Co., which brought it to market in 1990, according to Wikipedia’s history of the toy.

A Steel Spring Wrapped in Fabric

The mechanism was the whole appeal: a flat strip of flexible steel, curved into a C-shape and sandwiched inside colorful fabric, that would snap flat against a wrist the instant it made contact. That same steel spring, according to reporting from TIME’s retrospective on the era’s best toys, credits Anders and Main Street Toy Co. with turning a shop-class curiosity into a genuine cultural phenomenon almost overnight.

When the Steel Started Cutting Through

The same spring steel that made the snap satisfying also made the bracelets a documented laceration hazard. According to Bustle’s history of the fad, Connecticut issued one of the earliest formal recalls after reports of the fabric covering wearing through and exposing the sharp metal edge underneath. A retrospective from Grunge notes that school districts in New York and Pennsylvania moved to ban the bracelets from classrooms within roughly a year of the toy’s initial retail boom.

The Recalls Weren’t Just a 1990s Problem

The CPSC recalled Toysmith’s animal-themed snap bracelets in 2012 specifically over a laceration hazard, with the commission’s own notice warning that “the metal strip inside the bracelets can break through the fabric, posing a laceration hazard to consumers” — nearly identical language to the complaints that got the original 1990 product banned from schools two decades earlier. The commission issued a nearly identical recall again in 2019, against Fantasia Accessories’ slap bracelets.

A Fad That Kept Needing the Same Warning

What’s genuinely surprising isn’t that a 1990 toy had a safety flaw. It’s that the specific mechanical failure, thin fabric wearing through to expose a sharp steel edge, never actually got engineered out of the product category. Every generation of cheap slap bracelet since Anders’ original design has run the same risk.