Sugar Free Fruit Stripe

Flavor: Yikes! Stripes! Fruit Stripe Gum! In new Sugar Free Fruit Stripes, there are five flavors: Wet N' Wild Melon, Cherry, Lemon, Orange, and Peach Smash. I don't know what's so special about Melon and Peach that they deserve descriptive adjectives, but whatever. In an effort to get rid of this gum sooner, I'll review all five flavors here, despite the fact that this high of a dose of Aspartame in one sitting may give me cancer. (PHENYLKETONURICS: CONTAINS PHENYLALANINE.)

Wet N' Wild Melon: This is the Green-wrapped stick in the pack. I don't know which of the other flavors would be green... so I'm assuming it's supposed to be melon. Starts off with a tart blast and fades into a nice sweet-tart flavor. However -- I don't really taste much melon at all. Fades to nothing very quickly.

Lemon: The yellow-wrapped stick actually tastes like lemon. A really nice lemon, in fact! Lemon isn't a flavor often seen in sugarless gum, so I was pleasantly surprized by this. It tastes a lot like Country Time Lemonade, and it's actually hard to beleive that this lemon is sugarless. Also fades quickly.

Orange: Again, great orange flavor from the get-go that doesn't at all taste sugarfree. This could be a cube of Hubba Bubba. It's great. Fades fast (notice a pattern here?)

Peach Smash: The stick itself is blue and yellow. Why? It's an adequate peach, but certainly not as fantastic as the Lemon or Orange. This one fades away to nothing much faster than either of those two, as well. Not one of the better flavors in the pack.

Cherry: Decent news for our cherry-loving gum friend out there - this cherry is pretty darn good at the get-go. None of that horrible mentholy cherry we've seen in other cherry sugarfree gums. Fruit Stripe got this one spot-on, but unfortunately the quick-fade and the 4 other flavors in the do not warrant a purchase of this if all you're looking for is cherry. Look elsewhere.

Texture: This is where Fruit Stripes loses me entirely. The texture of this gum is absolutely horrible. It starts off bad and gets worse, eventually resembling the feeling of chewing those horrible tasteless Halloween was lips, or what was leftover after you sucked the juice out of those little bottle-shaped wax things. You can't blow bubbles or crack it in any way - if you try to spread it out over your tongue it thins out into an indistinguishable web of grossness. If it held its own texture-wise, this gum could have been great.

Overall: Texture completely ruins it, but one positive thing about this gum is that every wrapper has a temporary tattoo on it. Bonus! Having just chewed 5 pieces of this gum for this review, my desk is now strewn with little multi-colored Zebras playing sports. If I wasn't wearing a short-sleeved shirt and/or didn't work for a company whose mascot IS a Zebra, I'd be proudly wearing a sleeve of Zebra tattoos, because I am 5 years old and that would be awesome. So while the texture of the gum negates any positives in the flavor column, the addition of the tattoos on the wrapper adds the extra gumball to the rating.

Rating: oo (two gumballs)