Chicago ? Orange, red, blue, black — they’re just thin, rubbery bracelets that come in a rainbow of colors, but they’re causing quite a stir.

First made popular by Madonna and other pop stars in the 1980s, “jelly bracelets” are making a comeback with teens and some grade-school kids. But this time, there’s a twist: In some parts of the country, they’re calling them “sex bracelets” — with various colors supposedly representing promises to perform sex acts in a game called “Snap.”

As the story goes, break someone’s orange bracelet (or purple, in some cases) and you get a kiss. Red, a lap dance. Blue, oral sex. Black, intercourse. And so on.

“They’ve been selling like crazy,” says Andy Ball, a clerk at The Alley, a clothing and accessories store in Chicago. He says he learned about their secret meaning from a group of teens who came into the store about a month ago.

Still, it’s unclear whether young people are really following through with the sex acts. And some experts think most youths are hearing about the game from recent news reports, not one another.

Snopes.com, a Web site dedicated to exposing urban legends, has deemed the validity of sex bracelets “undetermined.”

“Every now and then, I get a note from kids who say it is true,” said Barbara Mikkelson, Snopes.com’s co-founder. “But I get a heck of a lot of e-mails from kids who are outraged that adults think they would do this. To them, (the bracelets) are just a fashion statement.”

Banned bracelets

Regardless, a few schools in such states as Illinois, Ohio and Florida have banned the bracelets.

Andy Ball, a clerk at The Alley in Chicago, holds a selection of jelly bracelets sold at the store. A controversy has started with the bracelets; they are now being called sex

“It’s about the disruption of the school day,” said Joann Hipsher, principal at one of the schools — Malabar Middle School in Mansfield, Ohio. She said students were spending too much time “worrying about who had them, who had been snapping them.”

Elizabeth Cooke, a fourth-grade teacher in Baltimore County, said she was surprised when a fifth-grader told her the bracelets had “secret meanings — one being, if someone broke one it meant you have to have sex.”

“He told me that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to wear them anymore because they were stupid,” said Cooke, whose school allows the bracelets as a fashion item, if they cause no distractions.

“In my opinion,” she added, “he shouldn’t even be thinking about sex at all.”

No hidden meaning

But in other parts of the country, teens say no one they know calls them “sex bracelets.”

“It’s kind of outrageous and ridiculous. I think the media is making an issue out of nothing,” says Kelly Egarian, a 17-year-old from Englewood Cliffs, N.J., who serves as a consultant for Teenage Research Unlimited, a suburban Chicago firm that tracks youth trends.

In fact, when the staff at Teenage Research asked its 300-some young consultants nationwide about sex bracelets, they found nothing concrete.

“They knew of a friend who had a friend who had a friend who knew about this,” says Michael Wood, vice president of Teenage Research. “But no one could point a finger to anyone who was actually doing this.”