The Fushigi Ball Marketing Scam

Being a late night watcher of the Qubo Night Owl bloc, I was recently introduced to the latest “As Seen on TV” product, the “Fushigi ball.” If you’ve never seen the ads, basically it shows a group of young people playing around with a stylish-looking acrylic and silver ball that seems to float, roll, and glide magically across their arms and hands with very little effort. The effect is so amazing you have to wonder if it isn’t all just hokum. But not to worry! Just as you become most skeptical, the ad reassures you that the Fushigi is, in fact, a “magic ball” that “defies gravity”.

Not one to take seriously a product that would shamelessly glom off the success of a popular anime series (“Fushigi Yugi”, anyone?), I at first brushed the entire ad campaign off as a mere joke. But because I’m one of those science nerd junkies, I eventually became curious about the “science” behind the Fushigi– if, in fact, there was any. Who knew– maybe these things actually did defy gravity in some form, but through some good old-fashioned geek science. After being blown away by the weirdness that is non-Newtonian liquid, I was open to the possibility that maybe there was something about the composition of these balls that allowed them to move so elegantly.

So I went online to try and learn more about the Fushigi. All it took was just a few minutes into my internet search to discover the “secret” behind these balls. Once you find out what that is, you’ll be positively disgusted.

Let me start out by saying that what you see in the ads is very real. There are no camera gimmicks or tricks– the people in these commercials really are handling the Fushigi, and the ball really is rolling around and gliding like it’s defying gravity. But why is it doing that? It’s not because there’s anything inherent in the ball itself that’s causing it to move that way. It’s moving that way because the people who are handling it are skilled in an art called “contact juggling.” In case you have no idea what that is, here goes: contact juggling is a highly specialized skill in which a person uses sleight of hand and manual dexterity to make any object appear that it’s floating and gliding.

Although contact juggling can be mastered by anyone with enough practice, it’s also not for the faint of heart. It’s a very challenging skill– so challenging, in fact, that even experienced jugglers find themselves struggling to master even the basics in a few short hours. (Watch this YouTube video of a juggler attempting to handle a Fushigi). So even if for the sake of argument we said that the Fushigi ads give audience members fair warning that they’ll have to spend months practicing how to handle the ball effortlessly, the campaign is still being incredibly deceptive by presenting it as something that they’ll easily be able to manipulate in a short amount of time.

Bottom line? The marketing behind the Fushigi is 100% pure hogwash, through and through. Contrary to the assertion in the ads that there’s something inherently special about the ball that makes it “defy gravity”, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Any object can be made to appear to “defy gravity” if one practices the art of contact juggling long enough; you don’t need a corny-sounding ball, expensive ball to do so.

To make just this exact point, an experienced contact juggler actually used a run of the mill orange as a demonstration on YouTube (you can see this in the video entitled, How is a Fushigi Ball Like an Orange?). If you watch the video, you’ll see that just like in the TV ads, the orange “floats” no differently than a Fushigi. Of course an orange may not look as “flashy”, but it does just as good a job as a $20 acrylic and metal ball.

Usually I laugh off such flagrantly manipulative advertising. But I can’t in this case, because unlike so many As Seen on TV ad campaigns, the one for the Fushigi is probably one of the most shameless I’ve ever come across recently. This is especially true when you consider that it’s clearly directed towards impressionable young children and teens who are still not worldly enough to know when they’re being handed a line of bull. It’s one thing if an adult gets fooled by a product, quite another if it’s a child. All the adult loses is a sense of pride and a few bucks. But the child gets smacked with the bitter experience of disillusionment. And that’s just not cool.

In all likelihood, you probably won’t fall for the marketing scam that is the Fushigi. However, your impressionable young children, nieces, or nephews might. In the event that they do, don’t waste your time getting them an overpriced ball that, according to contact jugglers, isn’t even well made for its purpose. Show them videos of contact juggling on You Tube and how they can use anything from a much cheap ball to even an orange to make things “float.” You’ll not only save yourself the money, but spare them the crushing disappointment of finding out that the “magic” ball they so desperately want is anything but magical.