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The Strange Story Of How Tide Pod Eating Went Viral

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How did Tide Pod eating go viral? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Emmad Mazhari, Product Designer, on Quora:

This story is long and very weird.

In 2012, P&G released a new product, Tide Pods, that were meant to make doing laundry easier. Following the launch of the product, poison control saw an increase in calls by children eating Tide Pods [1]. This should make us confront two truths about the world:

  1. Tide Pods look like candy (delicious candy at that). The bright colors, shapes, texture and weight all resemble that of a ‘bite-sized’ snack. It’s weird to say this all but it’s the truth. It’s why kids ate this and why many people I know (myself included) joked about eating these when they first came out - something in the human brain makes Tide Pods look enticing.
  2. Tide Pods are poisonous and you definitely should not eat them.

When in 2012 Tide Pods launched, these jokes about people eating them existed - but in small niches and never spoken about publicly because admittedly it is very weird. For a few years this persisted until the Onion wrote a piece in late 2015 about a child vowing to eat Tide Pods, titled: So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods. This, as far as I can tell, was the first major public point of acknowledgment that Tide Pod eating is a thought in many people’s minds.

This allowed the idea to kind of come alive on the internet and many small groups started joking about eating Tide Pods, particularly on Twitter and Tumblr. In mid 2017 CollegeHumor made a video about the same topic [2].

I’m not sure where the actual inflection point was, but at some point this joke started becoming super mainstream. It happened sometime in December of 2017 where the biggest accounts from ‘weird twitter’ joked about the meme, tan being one of the biggest ones.

At some point this joke bled over from weird twitter to mainstream twitter, with people joking about eating Tide Pods (sometime in late December).

This bled over into YouTube, where challenge videos have become a weird trope of doing the craziest thing to get views. A small YouTuber realized that there was an opportunity to capitalize on this trend by actually eating Tide Pods (though I think this was ironically) and on January 7th, 2018 TheAaronSwan669 [3] made the first version of the Tide Pod Challenge. This gained a bit of traction and other YouTubers started joining the trend and doing the Tide Pod Challenge. Many of these YouTubers have audiences that are kids/teenagers who I think did not get the ironic nature of this trend and the fact that YouTubers were doing this for views - and decided to do the Tide Pod Challenge themselves at home. This was where the challenge really went mainstream when news outlets were picking up on the trend (as some kids did go to the hospital because of this, though I’m pretty sure the number is not as large as morning shows make it out to be).

The next iteration of this, which we’re currently in the middle of, is making foods look like Tide Pods. Some examples of which are a pizzeria in in Brooklyn (of course).

As far as I can tell this trend is on the downwards slope right now, the peak being the media’s coverage of it.

Footnotes

[1] Laundry Detergent Pods | Health Hazard - Consumer Reports

[2] Don't Eat the Laundry Pods. (Seriously. They're Poison.)

[3] TIDE POD CHALLENGE!!!

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