Meme History: The Tide Pods Challenge
It feels like a trope that parents used to scare their children into behaving well by telling them that if they used bad words they were going to wash their mouths out with soap, but in the 2010s, children all over the internet flipped the script on those parents by voluntarily eating soap. Enter: The Tide Pod Challenge.
Tide Pods first hit the market
In February 2012, Proctor and Gamble introduced Tide Pods, a laundry detergent capsule designed to be just thrown in the wash rather than measuring out liquid detergent per load.
The problem is that they look like candy.
This led to concerned moms pushing for increased safety after very marginal amounts of children ate them by accident. But if you can remove yourself from the horror that those few toddler-parents must have been living through, you can imagine why this is funny. Mom groups were trying to get P&G to stop making them entirely, and people were already making jokes about it.
In December 2015, The Onion posted an article written from the point of view of a child who really wants to eat one. On April Fools Day 2017, CollegeHumor posted a video titled “Don’t Eat the Laundry Pods. (Seriously. They’re Poison.)”.
In July of that year, a Reddit /r/intrusivethoughts post saying, “bite into one of those Tide Pods. Do it.” was posted, and in December of that year a tweet saying “no more Xanax in 2018 we eating Tide Pods” alongside other similar tweets went up, multiple of which gained tens of thousands of likes.
As the Tide Pod wave continued cresting, the Onion even went back to it with a story about “Sour Apple” Tide Pods. It began to be an easy way for anyone to karma farm online, even making its way to the cosplay and anime communities.
Which brings us to…
Tide Pod Challenge
On January 7th, 2018, YouTuber Aaron Swan posted a video pretending to be about to eat a Tide Pod. In the next few weeks, videos of children actually eating Tide Pods flooded the internet, which you’ll have to take our word for because YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram tried to take them down.
Within a month, Tide Pods were seemingly all anyone could talk about.
As more and more young people began streaming videos of themselves voluntarily ingesting them, P&G was forced to release statements they probably never thought they'd ever have to make, saying things like, “Laundry pacs are made to clean clothes. They should not be played with, whatever the circumstance…”
Maybe grasping at straws, Tide tweeted a video starring Rob Gronkowski in which he said, “No, no no no no no no.” They also issued multiple tweets and replies directing people to poison control and urging consumers not to consume Tide Pods.
Stores locked Tide Pods up, memes began circulating of people eating and cooking with them, the New York State legislature introduced a bill calling on P&G to make packaging better and clearer, and then, later in the year, Tide released the new “Tide Eco Box."
The reaction
This prompted users to say that it looked like boxed wine. But if, bizarrely, Tide didn’t get the memo here, they could take solace in knowing they weren’t the only ones.
Because you know what’s better for small children to be pounding than cleaning products, but not by a lot?
Scotch.
A year after Tide Pods were the hottest candy kids couldn’t get their hands on, The Glenlivet released their own candy-shaped treats, which, unsurprisingly, were mocked by everyone who saw their promo video on Twitter.
If there’s one thing we should all take away from the tale of the Tide Pod challenge, it’s that laundry detergent is unsafe for human consumption.
Every generation has things that seemed like good ideas at the time, but of all the things Gen Z-Alpha could have chosen as their cringey, dumb-youth thing, it's hard to imagine one with more immediate ramifications.
It started as a joke, and it should have stayed a joke. But…it didn’t.
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