If You Like Tide Pods You're Going to Absolutely Love This Rewind of Another "Challenge"

The kids these days.

It started innocently enough. Teens were eating Tide Pods as part of the Tide Pod challenge. I guess that was to be expected given the state of public education and the amount of time teens and “young adults” spend on social media. According to the best timelines I can find, the Tide Pod challenge seems to have its roots in an Onion article and graduated to internet meme status in January 2018. Of course, if it is on the internet it must be true

From that humble beginning, we graduated into a full-blown epidemic of stupid where people died and suffered permanent disability because…well… I’ll just leave it there for fear of offending someone–again.

Well, that just wasn’t good enough for a lot of folks. So now we have this. The Condom Challenge.

As best I can tell, this first became a thing in 2013. This was back when the Tide Pod eaters and teen gun control advocates, to the extent they are different people, were worried what puberty would be like. The first one, a girl doing the “challenge” to the music of Taylor Swift’s “22” is considered the version to which all others are compared.

https://youtu.be/OFAWJK5s0wE

(There is something strangely familiar about this kid…I just can’t place it.)

And because bad ideas never go away (see, for instance, socialism) the Condom Challenge is back.

The condom challenge is no way to treat your nose. Or your lungs and throat, for that matter.

The years-old dangerous dare has resurfaced in recent days as the latest perverse, potentially life-threatening internet challenge. People attempting the condom-snorting challenge try to shove and inhale an unwrapped condom into one nostril, and then pull it back out through their mouth.

Good info for those who failed high school biology…which is probably a lot the people participating in these challenges.

Your nasal passage is indeed connected to the back of your throat, but you really don’t need to prove it with a piece of plastic.

The party trick could cause you to choke on the spot. But it has other, potentially more long-term consequences, too.

Your nose is designed to be the body’s air filter, cleaning the air you take in before it lands in the lungs, and adding moisture to it along the way. It’s a delicate system that’s not designed to take in condoms.

And this helpful advice.

Even in a best-case scenario where someone ingests a condom and then manages to pull it out of their mouth without choking, getting it stuck, or accidentally swallowing the roughly seven-and-a-half inch piece of plastic, it’s not a harmless prank. The person may also be swallowing some extra chemicals, too. Condoms that aren’t designed for oral sex can have lubricants on the outside that aren’t meant to be ingested in large doses.