A box arrived at my work with a seductive message.

It promised "the pouty lips you always wanted. Naturally."

I had not given much thought to the state of my lips, but I supposed that maybe they could be a little plumper.

"What harm could there be in trying a device that doesn't involve needles or chemicals?" I thought. The company had sent my office the CandyLipz Xtreme Lip Shaper to be tested, so why shouldn't I test it? In retrospect, when "lips" is spelled with a Z and "extreme" with a capital X, it may be a red flag about the scientific validity of the product.

I vaguely recalled hearing about some ridiculous "lip challenge" that had been making the rounds among teenagers, but this wasn't that, of course. This product came in a fancy box and retailed for $69.99.

I handed the instructions to a colleague, who seemed a little too amused and eager to spearhead the experiment. After inserting my lips in the mouthpiece, I was told to compress the sides of the cylinder. When I released the tube, it created a vacuum that sucked my lips into the plastic tube.

It hurt.

I looked at the fashion editor who had been guiding this misadventure, and she said the directions said to keep it dangling there for two minutes.

It hurt a lot. When the two minutes were up, I broke the seal and peeled my lips out.

They were definitely swollen. Within minutes, I saw a reddish-purple ring form around my lips.

I looked like I had been punched in the mouth.

The discoloration around my mouth got darker by the hour. My colleague advised me to find an ice pack. By the time I got home, hours later, it looked like my mouth had been lined with black marker.

"Look what I did," I said to my family.

"What happened?" my 13-year-old daughter asked. I described the product I had tried at work.

"You know you just basically did the Kylie Jenner lip challenge, right?" she said, making no effort to contain her smirk.

"No. Noooooooo."

The indignity of being called out by your child stings more than sticking your lips in a vacuum. Trust.

My husband took one look at the ring of dark bruising around my mouth and said: "You are not a child. And you are not a Kardashian."

Duh.

I didn't have to pout. I was already there.

"I MADE A BAD CHOICE," I announced to all parties who would be witnessing the results of said choice for days to come.

My ego was bruised far worse than my lips.

Sometimes it's difficult to remember how the teenage brain operates. We may recall that we did some foolish things in our youth, but the plus side of thinning hair (and lips) is that experience and maturity make those occurrences far less common over the years.

When confronted with some ridiculous behavior, we may be tempted to ask an otherwise intelligent young adult: What in the world were you thinking?

So what makes teenagers -- and, ahem, the occasional columnist -- take such foolish chances?

A study out of New York University suggests that adolescents are not inherently risk-takers, but they are more likely than adults to take actions when they don't fully know or understand the consequences of their actions.

"In risky situations where you know the outcomes and the probability of the outcome, teenagers didn't take more risks than adults," a lead researcher told LiveScience about the study in 2012. "Teenagers went for the risky option when the outcome was not exactly known." When adolescents know an activity's potential dangers more precisely, they are less likely to participate.

Had I read the accompanying instructions on the Xtreme Lip Shaper myself and known that 80 percent of users end up with bruises on their face, I would have found someone else to test the product. Clearly, there wasn't much forethought involved. I was reminded how easily rational adults can fall prey to marketing and peer pressure.

For five days, I took pictures of my damaged lips and studied the photos for signs that the marks were fading.

"I can't believe I did this to myself," I thought each time. I also took herbal remedies, and watched videos and read articles on how to heal bruises faster.

As the days passed, I also embraced my humility and vowed to remember this feeling when one of my children does something head-shakingly dumb.

There's a thin line between a fat lip and a fathead.

Lucy, a sweet-looking toddler with wispy blond hair, needs $450 for head shots because a talent agency is "very interested." Her mother wants you to chip in to "start her on her road to success."

A Washington University student would like some help buying a piano because she can't use the practice rooms on campus. They aren't always open, you see.

There's a local high school student with a 3.67 GPA who wants to take a 10-day trip to Costa Rica during spring break. Her mother would like you pitch in, because her daughter "could really use a trip like this for stress relief."

Or you could throw in a few dollars for a high school rugby team in San Francisco that needs money for a trip to Australia and New Zealand.

These are all public pleas for donations from the crowdfunding site GoFundMe.com, which has collectively raised a billion dollars for a multitude of causes in the past year alone.

Giving has always been a social act, one that binds people together and encourages reciprocity. Now, it's also a social media act.

In one way, it's been a blessing to be able to help people with unexpected funeral or medical expenses, or those dealing with some other crisis or disaster. It's rewarding for the giver to help a friend or stranger during a difficult time.

It's not so rewarding to see people begging for money for boob jobs, lavish birthday parties or vacations.

One mom, and certainly not the only one, posted that she wants to throw her 1-year-old a $1,000 birthday bash; won't you pitch in? (For the record, she surpassed her goal and raised $1,095.)

The number of birthday-related campaigns within the "Celebrations and Special Events" category on GoFundMe has "skyrocketed," according to a site spokesman. There was a 330 percent increase in donation volume for birthday campaigns between 2013 and 2014.

Sites such as GoFundMe have a financial stake in promoting and normalizing this uncouth behavior: They take a 5 percent cut of whatever is raised. There's also a 3 percent fee for their payment processors. Your charity or good will is their for-profit business enterprise. Also, it's "giver beware" in each of these transactions, because there's no oversight to see if the donations go toward their stated purpose.

Offline, if someone asks for money (for anything), and someone else wants to give, it's a private interaction between those two parties.

But when that transaction happens in a public space, it reminds the rest of us that we have to teach our children a value we may have taken for granted: It's not acceptable to ask friends or strangers to pay for your luxuries or to fund your wish list. The sheer volume of such shameless requests -- for things from dream weddings and cosmetic surgery to children's hobbies or sports equipment -- makes me wonder why anyone thinks it's OK.

Has crowdfunding replaced the hustle? Or has it become the new hustle?

The apparent logic is: If someone wants to give, why shouldn't I ask? There's a simple answer: It's greedy and lacking in self-pride. Would you stand on a street corner, holding a sign, asking for spare change for your daughter's cheerleading uniform or your son's football camp? Because it looks just as ridiculous to pass the tin cup on the information superhighway.

You're not asking people to fund a shortfall in your budget. You're asking them to fund a shortfall in your priorities.

No one should feel guilty for declining to donate to another able-bodied person's wish list. The world is full of causes and people with needs more compelling than a birthday trip to Mexico.

In fact, those who succumb to social pressure when they are tagged on Facebook with such ridiculous fundraising requests are enabling a culture of entitlement.

Here's a radical idea: Go fund yourself.

This was Angela Nicole's one chance to get pregnant, and she wasn't hopeful.

She was 40 years old, single, and had spent all her savings trying to conceive.

Angela, who did not want to use her last name, had been trying fertility treatments for more than two years. She had been through five rounds of IVF. In the last one, they weren't able to extract a single egg to fertilize. All in all, she had taken almost 500 shots. She injected the subcutaneous ones into her stomach herself; her father helped her with the intramuscular shots. There were days when she was getting three or four shots a day.

Out of all those attempts, she had a single viable frozen embryo to be implanted.

Her brother, Shawn, who had been supportive through the ups and downs of her treatment, told her that even though the probability was bad, the possibility was there.

"I knew the probability of it working was getting really bad," he said. "Like, extremely bad."

It came down to this one chance.

It worked.

Sophia was born four months ago. Angela's mother was over helping with the newborn when they decided to take a picture to document the journey Angela went through to have her.

She had saved nearly all the syringes and medicine vials from her IVF cycles in a big wicker basket. The day they took the photo, her mother rocked Sophia until she fell asleep, then they laid her gently on a sheet on the ground. Angela arranged the vials and syringes (all fully capped) in a circle around her sleeping baby.

"I wanted her to know how much I really, really wanted her," she said.

She climbed up on a ladder to take the picture. But when she looked down on the image, she thought, Why don't I just do a heart? It was her way of saying to her baby, "Hey, I love you."

She rearranged the needles and took the shot.

Angela, of Troy, Illinois, works as an accountant. She had focused on her career, and in her late 30s, she said she realized time was running out for her to become a mother.

"I waited a long time to find a husband, but I never did," she said. She thought about what it would mean to be a single parent. She loves her own father dearly and thought about what it would mean to have a child who wouldn't have one.

"I knew all the bad," she said. She struggled with all her doubts.

She wanted a baby anyway.

She spent more than $100,000 on the treatments. She had worked since she was 15 years old and saved diligently, never taking exotic vacations or buying fancy cars.

"I spent my money on what I really wanted," she said.

The fertility clinic where she did the IVF, the Sher Fertility Institute, contacted her a few months ago to follow up on her pregnancy. She shared the photo she had taken of Sophia surrounded by the remnants of her treatment.

They asked if they could post it on their Facebook page, and she agreed.

The image has now been viewed more than 2 million times, shared and liked and commented upon thousands of times around the world. At a time when more and more women are waiting to have children and relying on fertility treatments to have a baby, the photo touched a nerve.

Shawn, who has worked as a photographer for years, says that people identified with the message in the image -- that the photograph is interesting, but the story behind it even more so. All of those needles could have been for nothing. It came down to one chance.

Even after she got pregnant, Angela needed shots to maintain the pregnancy. She started bleeding at six weeks and thought she had lost the baby. Her blood pressure spiked near the end of her pregnancy, and she had to be induced.

"People who go through (IVF) tend to keep it to themselves," her brother said.

The experience was difficult and emotional, but this photo showcases the miracle.

"It's worth all the needles and the stress and the waiting and the ups and downs," she said. She thinks her photo of Sophia spread so far because it got to the heart of the reason people try over and over again.

People ask why she didn't adopt. She says it was one of the options she considered, but as a single woman in her 40s, it would have been nearly impossible to adopt a newborn. She wanted the entire experience from the very beginning.

Even now, when someone refers to her as a "mom," she says she's taken aback for a moment.

"Wait. What? I'm someone's mom?"

It was a dream for so long, finally realized.