6 Super Cool and Affordable Lasers

Let’s get something out of the way up top: This isn’t content borne of any sort of laser sponsorship. In fact, most of the links here are to Amazon products, and I’d highly recommend not making them your vendor for lights capable of burning your retinas. This is instead coming from someone, who, like jet packs, was long promised lasers. Chances of blasters aren’t looking great, and there’s also the fact that if they did exist, they’d immediately be involved in so many crimes and way less fun.

So, I’m left to look to the world of cheap consumer electronics to find a device that can fulfill my promise to my inner child that someday, we would fuck around with some cool lasers.

6 Laser Engravers

Look, it’s under extremely carefully controlled conditions, but with only a couple hundo, I can, indeed, buy a laser that will burn things. Not only that, but burn any design I want into I assume a very specific set of allowed materials. Is it a space war featuring red and green beams of light ricocheting to and fro, leaving oily holes in enemy robots? No, but I could very slowly burn the cool S into a piece of particle board, which 13-year-old me would still consider a pretty great afternoon.

5 Laser Fire Starters

Or, I could remove any idea of accuracy or intent and just instead keep the part where a laser burns things. Pyromania, one of a young teenage boy’s premier interests, only becomes more fascinating when you can do it all science style. All I need is again, a hundred or so dollars, which seems to be the sweet-spot price for lasers, and a website called BigLasers.com, which informs me they’re the “#1 Trusted Laser Source Since 2005,” will send me a little light pen that can send a dry leaf up in smoke. Give a Cub Scout one of these pre-camping trip, and you’re guaranteed a devastating forest fire.

4 Laser Hair Remover

As a trichotillomania enjoyer, there’s nothing more relaxing than removing a few choice hairs in times of boredom. Until now, I’ve had to do it with my hands, like some sort of anxious caveman. No more! For, once more, a hundred or so dollars, I can instead zip-zap my hair away until I’m a smooth-looking condom of a man. Svelte! Slick! Setting new land speed records on the Six Flags waterslide! It’s a laser device that makes me look like an alien, which is a sci-fi double whammy.

3 Laser Tripwire

Who doesn’t watch a secret agent or heist movie and wonder if they could human pretzel their way through a labyrinth of laser tripwires? Well, in this modern world, you can put that to the test, as long as you have, you guessed it, a couple hundred dollars (if you want to create a grid, at least). Now, unfortunately — or fortunately, if you’re a narc — these lasers aren’t the kind that will slice you up like that guy in Resident Evil if you get it wrong, but you can pretend! I’m sure the noise it makes is unpleasant at the very least.

2 Laser Measure

Man, lasers really failed us, didn’t they? Well, I guess there’s probably been some advancements that the Geneva Convention shut right down, but I really thought more stuff was going to be getting cut in half at this point. Instead, I guess I can harness the awesome power of lasers to see how far away a tree is without walking over there. It’s convenient. I just wish the tree wasn’t… totally fine, you know?

1 Laser Printer

God, that’s depressing. I thought I’d be watching incredible Laserball matches in some sort of neon blue dome, but instead, my beloved lasers are just being used to print my tax documents. I’m not even allowed to look at them because of “blindness.” Lame. This is like when your parents told you they got you a pet, but it was just a goldfish you had to feed stinky gravel to every day.