The ‘Tide Pod Challenge’ is probably one of the stupidest trends out there at the moment.
There’s a joke doing the rounds about people eating the laundry detergent pods due to them looking like colorful fruity snack!
But now the joke has gone a bit far and some people are actually putting the highly poisonous pods into their mouths, risking winding up with a nice trip to the emergency room to have their stomach pumped.
An Instagram account has taken the farce even further as one of their latest videos shows a guy puncturing a Tide Pod and squeezing the green goo out to vape it.
The video was shared by the Instagram account Vape Tricks, which looks to specialise in slow-motion shots of people firing off smoke rings from their mouths like ghosts.
And as you’d expect, the guy doesn’t look like he enjoys vaping the Tide Pod juice at all, as he immediately crumples away spluttering in a haze of smoke. Bet his lungs felt clean afterwards though.
The experience however, doesn’t look to have affected the guy too much as the vid quickly moves on to him summoning a vape from his mouth like a big fireball.
Obviously you really shouldn’t try doing stunts like this at home – doctors have warned that ingesting the Tide Pods is likely to give you dodgy guts at the very least. But kids are vulnerable, so please warn them!
In the worst cases, people who swallow the pods may even end up getting rushed to A&E, suffering from breathing difficulties and severe burns.
“You’ll get burns to the skin, burns to the eyes, and a lot of problems that are more severe. Burns to the respiratory tract, burns to the esophagus,” Dr. Joe Krug told WXIN.
Procter & Gamble – Tide’s parent company – has issued a statement responding to the fad, basically reiterating what should really be common sense: just don’t do it.
“Our laundry pacs are a highly concentrated detergent meant to clean clothes and they’re used safely in millions of households every day,”the statement reads.
“They should be only used to clean clothes and kept up, closed and away from children. They should not be played with, whatever the circumstance is, even if it is meant as a joke.”
Please don’t try this at home!