Everyone is talking about what's "in" and what's "out," which is a baby's way of predicting trends for the new year. Influencers are doing this. Magazines are doing it. People who call themselves "trend forecasters" and seem to have more money than God are doing this. None of these people, to my knowledge, have any actual ability to see the future. As such, they are less qualified than us to explain what will be big in 2023.
We, at Defector, consulted our very expensive and rare crystal ball. It is so beautiful. I wish you could see it. It looks like a bowling ball that glows. Wow. We can only bring it out for one day a year, and the first day back in the blog mines seemed like the right time. The crystal ball is ancient, extremely haunted, and highly coveted. The crystal ball only lies sometimes, and very rarely steals the imagination of the peerer if they do not look in with an open mind. Eleven Defector staffers were brave enough to face the crystal ball, and plunge into its depths. Here is what they saw:
Color of the Year
The Inside Of Your Eyeballs When The Sun Is Out But You Aren't Awake Yet: Being sleepy was very fashionable in 2022. Everyone was exhausted because everything sucks! Waking up? That's loser shit! I wish I never had to do it and could be blissfully asleep forever. That's why I predict that the color of the year will be the exact color you see when you wake up to the terrible sound of your alarm, hit snooze, and close your eyes for five more minutes. There, in that moment before sleep, the color that will comfort you will be the sun coming through your eyelids, a weird desaturated red and orange, that darkens rapidly as your eyes roll back to sleep like a sunset. — Kelsey McKinney
Blue: The Pantone Color of the Year for 2022 was "Very Peri," a pretty periwinkle shade the Pantone Color Institute’s executive director and vice president agreed “embraces the uncertainty and cautious optimism of our moment.” You really can just make up any old thing, can’t you? If anybody old enough to get a driver’s license is feeling any particular optimism about “our moment” in 2022, cautious or otherwise, I don’t know them and don’t care to, given they are an ignoramus.
I predict that the color of 2023 will be: Blue. This thrilling new shade captures the, ah, the effervescence (?) of the… the zeitgeist? Yeah, that’s the ticket. In 2023 you are already seeing Blue show up everywhere, from the Share button in Google Docs to (some) Nintendo Switch controllers to at least a couple of other things I can see when I look around the room I’m sitting in right now. Sometimes the sky is even Blue, but not at the moment. The sky in fact is a very unfashionable gray, which was 2021's color. Lame! — Albert Burneko
The Color Of A Bruise 18 Hours After Waking Up In The Middle Of The Night To Pee And Tripping On Your Cat And Slamming Your Knee Into The Coffee Table: It’s like sort of a yellowish brownish purplish color. — Barry Petchesky
Orange: For Trump's hair and the color of his prison jumpsuit when he has to clean up trash on the highway. — Ray Ratto
The Blood of the Enemy: The color we will come to associate with 2023 is the deep dazzling crimson of the blood of the enemy, pooled at our feet and sprayed across our mighty shields. — Chris Thompson
"Old Dining Table" White: I noticed the other day that when the sun shines bright on the table in my kitchen/living room, it stops looking like one uniform color. Some spots are sleek and reflective, others are dull and scratchy, and still more have inexplicable flecks of red or blue or brown. Clearly this is a trend that will only gather steam as people continue to use their tables. — Lauren Theisen
An Interesting Question: A lot of people may not like what Elon is doing with Twitter Blue but I know a lot of big names in the Valley who will be watching it closely. — Drew Magary
Lavender: Once the weather turned cold in New York, and dry to boot, I became obsessed with getting a humidifier for my apartment. I started doing research and annoying my girlfriend about it for a week or two. Finally, she told me not to buy one, end of story. Me being me, I kept bugging her about it until she finally cracked and told me that she didn't want me to buy one because she was going to get me one for Christmas. Way to ruin the surprise, Luis.
Anyway, once the humidifier arrived, it came with three scented oils that would filter through our bedroom. There is a peppermint one that neither of us really found appealing. There's also "spa water," which is much better than it sounds but still not perfect. And then there is "lavender dream," which hit the exact spot I wanted it to.
I love lavender smells; I always buy the lavender dish soap that I have bought for years, and my favorite candle smell is lavender as well. It doesn't hurt that the color is delightful in its own way; purple is my favorite color, and I'd say lavender is my second favorite tint, after burgundy. Given that I have made burgundy the color of the year for pretty much all my adult life, let's change things up in 2023 and make it lavender instead. — Luis Paez-Pumar
Yellow: I've been seeing yellow everywhere. A dijon-yellow door on the house down the block, the ombre yellow of tiny bougainvillea flower petals, set off by the surrounding red-violet bracts, a pair of golden suede clogs, that cool yellow strip on the wall where the morning sun peeks in, straw-colored flecks in my friend's irises, white-yellow sweet corn, an aureolin bikini on champagne sand, saffron rice. Yellow is inviting and playful and it makes me happy when I see it, so I'll be looking for more yellows this year. — Laura Wagner
Haze: This color is like both of the colors of the Phoenix Suns logo, combined, and baked for 45 minutes at 415°F until both the purple and orange are inarguably “present,” but, also, inarguably “kinda of equal parts grey and see-through.” Is haze an absence or a presence? Is it beautiful (sunsets) or ugly (smog)? Does it have a weight? As a big-time ambiguity-liker, my prediction for color of the year is Haze, thank you very much. — Patrick Redford
4:31 p.m., Wintertime: Kind of gray, kind of blue, somehow harder to see in than the actual dark. It comes on before 4:31 p.m., now. It comes on earlier some days than others; some days it just starts this way and stays there, dialing itself up and down without ever quite swelling towards actual daylight or sunset until such time as it is abruptly 6:07 p.m., and actually dark. There are movies that get made in Romania that show up on Showtime or especially Starz during the day, featuring actors you might recognize from TV or the films of the early 2000s in which they are getting revenge, or being chased through the woods, or being tormented by a manic and strangely styled John Travolta, where it always looks like this. I think it will be a big year for this color. — David Roth
Food of the Year
Little Arancini: Everyone is screaming! They want bite-sized fried rice balls! — Kelsey McKinney
Capers: In 2023 everybody is eating nonpareil capers. Just eating a lotta friggin’ capers! In all of the hip and sexy neighborhoods where the trendsetters set the trends, you walk down the street and the scenesters are just ramming giant wet fistfuls of briny capers into their mouths. All of the coffeeshops are gone, replaced by artisanal caper bars with long lines snaking around the block; you arrive at the counter and a “caperista” plunges a big stainless-steel ladle into a huge sloshing cauldron of capers and scoops them directly into your cupped hands and you wolf them down, right there at the cash register if you are “with it,” so that everybody can see that you are not just posing, you are not buying the capers just to be seen buying the capers, you are not a caper dilettante, you are not furtively dumping your double-handful of nonpareil capers into the garbage can but rather are eating the capers, because you want to, you are serious about the new, the frontier, which is capers. You turn to flash a green-studded grin at the fellow next in line, blinking back tears. “Capers,” you say, and he says, “Capers.”— Albert Burneko
Pizza: Wow! For the 1,026th year in a row, pizza is the world’s favorite food! Bread with tomatoes and cheese and other things on it: Does it get any better than that? No, it doesn’t, and it never has and never will. Salute to you, pizza. — Barry Petchesky
Herzegovina squeaking cheese: I have no idea what it is, and the store proprietor said he was out of stock, but it is a bucket list item now. Cheese that squeaks! — Ray Ratto
The Blood of the Enemy: 2023 will be the year when we finally slake our thirst for vengeance with the rich, dark blood of the enemy. This is more of a beverage, but nevertheless we will be nourished by the protein and possibly iron of delicious warm ichor, taken fresh from the source. —Chris Thompson
Marshmallows: Marshmallows will be ubiquitous in 2023. They're a year-round food! You can put them in hot cocoa when it's cold, and you can make s'mores outside when it's hot. Plus, I think we'll see more of them in ice cream, too, because it adds a delicious gooey dimension to an already perfect treat. This kind of flexibility makes marshmallows an obvious choice for the modern, on-the-go trend-setter. — Lauren Theisen
An Interesting Question: Watch out for the state of Idaho on the color front this year; Idaho is gonna matter. — Drew Magary
Chocolate Eclairs: There's a bakery near me that sells really delicious chocolate eclairs. I always get two, one to eat right away and one to save for the next morning. This has never failed me. — Luis Paez-Pumar
The broccoli growing in a big pot in our yard: When we moved back to Texas in the fall, our first order of business was planting a garden. Alex researched which plants were suited to the climate, what kinds of non-synthetic fertilizers we could use, and how to tend to each plant. We borrowed our neighbor's collection of empty pots, spent days tracking the sun around the yard to determine the absolute sunniest spot, and then hit up the local nursery. We planted cilantro, dill, thyme, two varieties of kale, green onions, and two broccoli plants. (As well as three non-edible amaryllis bulbs.) So far, we've harvested from all the plants except for the broccoli. For months, the broccoli plants grew larger and larger, dwarfing even the kale, but no flowers, the part of the broccoli plant you eat, appeared. And then suddenly, just before the new year, tucked into the center of the giant leaves: nubs! The broccoli is still too small to harvest but there they are, our tiny florets. Broccoli Watch 2023 is on. — Laura Wagner
This Is The Year That Everyone Realizes Avocados Are Bad: The case against avocados is simple, and, if you can forgive some NFL Draftese, it is that avocados are a low-ceiling, low-floor food. I am a lifelong California resident, so I am allowed to make this case. The worst smell known to human nostrils is an avocado that’s started to go bad. It smells like rotten frosting, spread out across slowly burning tires. This will occur without warning during some point in an avocado’s lifespan on your counter, and the fruit itself is expensive enough that you’ll probably try to eat some of it anyway, like a fool. Before the avocado gets to this state, it is a rock. The window between these two states is like 12 hours. If you are lucky enough to open your avocado at exactly the right time, congratulations, you have unlocked a slightly mushier form of water. As a bold truth teller with the geographic bona fides to take this heretical take, my prediction for food of the year is This Is the Year That Everyone Realizes Avocados Are Bad, thank you very much. — Patrick Redford
Anchovies: When I was a child, anchovies were a joke. This was before people in the United States knew how to eat. Vegetables were boiled until sanitary; the peak of home cooking involved filling something with ground beef and then cooking it until everything was the same color, and wet; all across the nation, otherwise normal people were opening a big can they brought home from the store and just shaking it until a gleaming hideous chicken came out, and then they would fucking eat it. Anchovies, full-flavored and foreign-coded and breath-wrecking and canned, were a gag—something that you would put on a pizza that you had delivered as a prank. This was embarrassing.
But this is a serious moment, and I believe we may at last be ready for a serious engagement with the anchovy. It is oily and fishy and small, low on the food chain and abundant in the ocean and versatile in its home uses. You’ve got the little white pickled Spanish-style ones, your boquerones, and those are a sophisticated treat for people who want to eat fish with their hands like a cartoon cat. Those are texturally and visually identifiable as fish, but the salted ones that come packed with oil in cans almost seem like another thing, although some slightly fancier ones do look more fish-like vis-a-vis having tails and bones. Either way, a couple will add character and punch to your pasta sauces and such and I would be happy to give you some recipes. The worst rich people in the world will someday fight each other with swords for the last tuna swimming in the oceans. They will not know that the joke is on them. The rest of us, glossy with all these benign oils and sated by the protein of this humble former prankfish, will probably be moving on to polenta by then. — David Roth
Word of the Year
Vibras: Everyone's saying "vibes" now, which makes it lame. But "vibes" is a useful word that has inundated our culture very quickly. In 2023, everyone will be saying "vibes" in Spanish. "Bad vibras" sounds phonically good. It's Good vibras to say vibras. — Kelsey McKinney
Acciaccatura: This Italian loan-word, referring to a type of music note, is just very fun to say. Acciaccatura. It really goes places. I predict that in 2023 we will all be saying it a lot. Acciaccatura. — Albert Burneko
And: You know how sometimes there’s a thing. But then there’s another thing? What if there were a word that let you mention the first thing but also the second thing, in the same sentence, in a way that showed there was some sort of connection between the things? God, wouldn’t such a word be especially useful now, when there are more things than ever before? It’s not a pipe dream, my friends. The word you’re looking for is and. Try it out! I have a feeling and will be one of your most-used words of 2023. — Barry Petchesky
Anarchosyndicalism: Because I think that's us. — Ray Ratto
Blood (of the Enemy): As we will be wearing it and drinking it pretty much constantly, naturally we will talk about it pretty often, and there are only so many synonyms. — Chris Thompson
Dogmatic: Someone on TikTok will think it means "like a dog," and when they go viral it will eventually replace the original meaning. — Lauren Theisen
An Interesting Question: 2022 was the year of "vibes," but word I'm hearing from my friends is that 2023 will be the year of "essentialness." — Drew Magary
Warlock: My World of Warcraft character is a warlock. It has been a warlock since 2007. It will be a warlock until someone finally pries this game away from me. Plus, it's a fun word to say. War. Lock. I don't know how this relates to the world at large, but this is my prediction, not yours, so there you go. Warlock. — Luis Paez-Pumar
Haberdashery: The past few years have seen a glut of horrible new words. Binance. Cheugy. Comirnaty. These words are not fun to say, and they are also not logical or easy to pronounce. But perhaps most tragically, they are not luxurious. Words are free to say and use, and therefore I always want to use the most opulent ones. That sandwich was delectable. What a verdant forest. Even chlamydia conveys a certain abundance. This is why my word to watch of 2023 is haberdashery: a word that is free to use but makes you feel like a million dollars. Haberdashery—the goods peddled by a haberdasher, such as hats, caps, and notions—screams extravagance, frills, the instant gratification of wearing a completely unnecessary hat. Haberdashery reminds me to be more specific in the words I use; why say I am going to the seafood store when I could instead wander to the fishmonger?I am no millionaire in real life, but at least I can speak like one. — Sabrina Imbler
Dialectics: Last year, it became evident to me that the word "material" and its attached concept had perhaps finally achieved uselessness in popular discourse when I saw a guy on Twitter say Roe being overturned didn't change people's material reality. I think something similar is at risk of happening with "dialectical." Like "material," the concept of dialects means specific, if not completely identical things, to specific theorists and political philosophers like Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and something vague and flexible to most other people. In many cases, people use "dialectical" to describe the dynamic between any related things. What dialectics really is, though, is a way of reasoning through opposing arguments or conflicting ideas in a way that reaches towards some kind of answer or revelation about a larger truth about history, knowledge/consciousness, and social change. It's definitely not an easily understood concept (at least for me ... I recommend What's Left of Philosophy's three-part series on Dialectics from 2021 if you're interested) and it's often frustrating, but it's also a productive way to reach potentially transformative understandings. I've found it useful in thinking about what to make of the cultural turn towards mysticism and seemingly obsessive introspection, the recent growth of the labor movement, and ideas about progress, in a normative sense, under capitalism. Anyhow, I predict we will see lots of people arguing about "dialectics" this year. — Laura Wagner
Occlude: I have conducted an official Discourse Assay to determine the metallurgic content of what people are losing their minds over, and I have reached the following conclusions: the linguistic gravity of TikTok is increasing, and TikTok outrage and metadiscussion cycles are like seven years behind their counterparts on Twitter. Therefore, I predict we get a big-time moment for a slightly more inane version of the “Is it bad to point out ‘bad’ things about ‘good’ celebrities?” circular argument. Bang-bang. This debate necessarily involves invocations of obfuscation and what is being hidden etc. As someone who is also looking for a good substitute for “obscure,” my prediction for word of the year is occlude, thank you very much. — Patrick Redford
Okay: This is already a popular word, and one that I myself say all the time in different ways and with different inflections that reflect the many contexts in which it is used. But the version of it that will take the culture by storm in 2023 is very specific—it is the first word I say most days, as I prepare to roust my ham-like bulk from the bed, and it is said the way that I said it this morning, with the gray light of one of those winter days in which the sun never quite comes up leaking around the curtains. Ohhhh-kay, I say to myself—my wife is in the other room, listening to a podcast about fountain pens while eating her breakfast, or she is already on a work call—and I am saying it sort of like a groan and sort of like I am making some big concession near the end of an exhausting negotiation. It is not said in a way that I would ever say the word, or any other word, to another person. It is said, maybe, in the way that you might say “okay” to a very old dog that has just laid down someplace impractical and weird. Okay, I say to myself, as many times as is necessary before I put my feet on the floor and stand up into a cascade of strange crackling physical static. Okay, okay, I say—and soon, everyone else will, too. — David Roth
Fashion of the year
Looking Like a Pyramid: Listen, for years the fashion girlies have been wearing huge sacks. This rules. Sacks are comfy. But what is old is lame and must die, so something new will have to take its place. It will be extremely structured clothing. The Pyramids are cool. They seem haunted. Everyone knows them. Don't you want to be like that? — Kelsey McKinney
Having Two Heads: Oh, you can’t cop this? Huh. Guess not all of us have a real fashion sense. — Albert Burneko
Croatia checkerboard anything: I am coming to grips with the fact that all national competitions bring unpleasant histories with them so I am endorsing design only, but the picnic tablecloth motif is barely used (Tennessee most notably), and since the Croats have perfected it, nobody else should ever be allowed to use it. — Ray Ratto
The Blood of the Enemy: Gore is the new black. — Chris Thompson
Carlos Correa Giants Jerseys: This item has everything: rarity, notoriety, tragedy. It tells a story and denotes insider status at the same time. The bootlegs will be everywhere long before Correa's walk-off dinger propels the Mets through the NLCS. — Lauren Theisen
An Interesting Question: There will be another sexual revolution this year, and it'll be both liberating and a little frightening. — Drew Magary
Pajamas That Are One Size Too Small: Similarly to the humidifier obsession, I also became invested in finding the perfect pajama set to wear this winter. I did some research and settled on some soft cotton pajamas; unfortunately they did not have lavender as a color option, but I got a soft blue instead. The only problem is that I forgot to set the size, so instead of a large set, I ended up receiving a medium. I am tall-ish, and so now when I wear these pajamas, the legs don't reach my feet and the arms are just short enough of the wrist to feel distracting and uncomfortable. It sucks, but since I am too lazy to ever return anything that I bought online, I am stuck with them. Join me. — Luis Paez-Pumar
Growing an Ear on Your Back like the Earmouse: No one really takes the time to listen these days. Maybe that's because there are too many things to listen to: podcasts, honking (cars), the homoerotic whispers traded between two businessmen, gossip, honking (geese). These sounds aren't going anywhere, and may even be multiplying as we speak. There's only one solution: Grow an extra ear out of your back like the earmouse, the mouse who had a tissue-engineered cartilage in the shape of an ear on its back. Why, you ask? Why not, I answer! More ears are better than none ears, and 2023's hottest trend will be humans hunched over from the not insignificant weight of a cartilaginous ear erupting gently from a shoulder blade, tilted toward the hustle and bustle of everyday life, listening for whatever noises may come. — Sabrina Imbler
Piercings: If last year was the year that late-blooming bisexuals declared themselves with septum piercings, I predict this year will see an expansion of relative normies getting facial and other body piercings, potentially as an expression of differentiation from others, including their past selves. Anecdotally, I've begun to see an uptick of eyebrow and tongue piercings, as well as creative body piercings of other types. Even people who have buttoned-up jobs are getting poked in discreet places; just like tattoos, piercings are now mainstream. I have a very low threshold for discomfort so I probably won't be participating, but keep an eye on everyone's new holes this year. — Laura Wagner
D.C. Shoes, Or, More Generally, Those Big, Ugly Skate Shoes With The Huge Tongues: What is the iron law of fashion? Cycles. [Ed. note: What?] When I was 13 I wore exclusively Etnies, D.C.’s, and, other skateboarding shoes with great big huge tongues, inflated as if haunted by the latent spirit of a pufferfish. They served a nominal purpose for skateboarding as such, but I liked them because they were comfortable and looked silly. My mom would sometimes roast my ass and point that they kind of looked like clown shoes, to which I’d be like, “So?” As someone grew out of this phase but has seen a great many fashion items that should have been left in the past unfortunately revive themselves, my prediction for fashion of the year is D.C. Shoes, Or, More Generally, Those Big, Ugly Skate Shoes With The Huge Tongues, thank you very much. — Patrick Redford
Creature of the Year
Very Round Bird: Look at him! He's round and sad and never moves. Same! — Kelsey McKinney
Porcupine: The internet is great for the cult of animals that you’d like to cuddle but for one reason or another (only live in South America/are endangered/are jerks/etc.) you can’t. And no one fits that bill better than porcupines, who are cool and interesting and very cute but happen to be extremely pointy. Some might argue that porcs’ status as the creature of 2023 is a reflection of our own fears and vulnerabilities, of our desire to love and be loved despite the barriers we surround ourselves with. But that argument would be stupid. I just like it when Rico eats peanut butter. — Barry Petchesky
Area Dog: Area dog is making us sign up for pet insurance for the ninth consecutive year. — Ray Ratto
The Enemy: Give me your blood you piece of shit! — Chris Thompson
Dogs With Light-Up Collars: I did not appreciate Blinky as a trend-setter in his moment. That moment, I should note, was some time ago; the building in my neighborhood in which Blinky (not his name, as far as I know) lived with his human owner, an irascible older man who favored suspenders, has since been knocked down. There’s nothing there now, just some plywood where people put up advertising posters and someone else from the neighborhood defaces them with nonsense about the dangers of 5G cell service. But in his day, the block belonged to Blinky, a scraggly mutt who looked to be heavy on chihuahua. Blinky’s owner did not put him on a leash, but he did put a blinking red light on his collar, which meant that while the man was sitting on his stoop or muttering at a pile of garbage bags or whatever, Blinky remained easy to spot while he was several feet away, barking at a parked car or a passing child. Blinky was the first neighborhood dog to rise to the level of fame at which my wife and I felt compelled to tell each other when we’d seen him while out running an errand. “Blinky snarled at me,” one of us might say to the other, “when I was coming back from the drugstore.” And then the other one would say “that’s nice.”
If you had asked either of us then, I think we both would have said that there was not a lot about Blinky that seemed like a template for future creature excellence. This was a failure of our foresight, more than anything else. While Blinky has long since left this mortal coil, the breakthrough that he and his owner pioneered is demonstrably catching on—or perhaps it’s just that the world is finally catching up. In recent weeks, I have noticed with great interest and some delight that more and more dogs are wearing light-up collars—not fitted with weird bike lights, like Blinky’s, but with the sort of glowstick-style light effects you might find at a ‘90s rave, or a Normal Gossip live event. These dogs seem quite happy to be wearing them, and the combined effect is both practical (it is easy to see the dog) and pleasing to the eye (this little Ewok-looking guy looks like he is going to listen to five hours of trance later tonight). Dogs only ever have so much say in this kind of thing, but if discerning owners are already picking this up—and beloved Defector pet Jakey already wears his light-up collar while running around on a local golf course—and dogs are into it, I’ll go ahead and make my prediction: this is the season of the Party Wolf. — David Roth
Hyena: Justice for the hyena! — Lauren Theisen
An Interesting Question: Is there any "creature" more mysterious, more SENSUAL dare I say, than Kyrsten Sinema? — Drew Magary
Pigeon: A couple of years ago, Justin asked us to write some blurbs about our favorite birds for the site. I have lived in New York for 15+ years now, and I love pigeons. Just love the little guys. They're smart, cute if you can get past the city dirt, and they have never pooped on me. Since I didn't get to write a blurb for that blog because I, uh, forgot, I will just state my love for pigeons here. They're going to have a good 2023. — Luis Paez-Pumar
See Attached:
— Laura Wagner
Dragonfly: This is another TikTok one, but it’s more of a wild guess. As someone who last summer had a dragonfly land on him while swimming in the Yuba River then called all his friends over to check it out and when they were looking at the dragonfly, another dragonfly one sidled up to the dragonfly on my skin and started humping it sexual-style, my prediction for creature of the year is dragonfly, thank you very much. — Patrick Redford
That thing that gave you that weird bite on your leg: Wait, where did you say that strange bite on your leg came from? Have you always had it? It looks a little pinker than it did just a few moments ago. You said it's a little itchy, but not too bad? Well, if it's not that itchy why have you been scratching it so much? You must know that scratching it only makes it worse, right? Maybe the itch is all in your mind, and you're only scratching out of obligation.
The bump looks even bigger now; do you think it's actually two bites close together as opposed to one? Multiple bites in a line can be a sign of bed bugs, you know, and they don't show up for many days after you've been bitten. You know, any two bites form a line; that's the definition of a line segment. And who says two mosquitoes didn't work in tandem to give you those welts? It could be fire ants too, I suppose, or chiggers. Can you see a stinger inside any of the bites? Wait, you've noticed even more of them since we started talking? You have a whole cluster now, right on your leg? You sure it's not razor burn? Are you sure those are even new bites? Maybe it, whatever it was, laid eggs or something. I'm kidding, just kidding! Wait, did that bite just move? Is it...throbbing? Dang it all to heck—that pink bump looks just like a tongue, one protruding ever so slightly out of a mouth. That's no bug, that's Dan Snyder, emerging Alien-style out of your thigh! You should really get that checked out. — Sabrina Imbler