Do Your Laundry, Not the Tide POD Challenge

Adam Steiner, Editor-in-Chief

Tide PODS are meant for doing the laundry, NOT for eating. Most people clearly understood this concept until late December of 2017, when the Tide PODS “challenge” came about and brought with it a large number of calls to the poison control center.

Tide PODS are a form of laundry detergent that come in a small, dissolvable, clear plastic coating that is designed to be conveniently thrown right into a washing machine.

However, these detergent packets seem to be missing the washer and ending up in the mouths of teenagers across the globe– and for no apparent reason.

Eating a Tide POD, or any form of laundry detergent for that matter, is dumb–plainly and simply dumb. It can cause long-term breathing issues, stomach issues, and in some cases even kidney failure. All these issues are not something to be taken lightly.

There is a difference between something like the Tide POD challenge and the cinnamon challenge, and that is the fact that cinnamon is at least meant to be consumed at some level; laundry detergent most certainly is not.\

The idea of people doing a challenge like this is not a new one. A number of other challenges exist: the sprite and banana challenge and the mentos and diet coke challenge to name a few.

All of these challenges are designed around the fact that the individual doing them will not succeed, and that the disastrous results will be funny. However, again, these things are meant to be eaten.

In totality, most of these challenges are rotten to the core, and while they may seem to be things that are done in harmless fun, they may have deadly consequences.

On the flip-side this, there are challenges that are designed to bring awareness to issues that affect people throughout the world.

One of these challenges includes the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) ice bucket challenge, which required that people dump a bucket full of ice water onto their head and then challenge friends, community members, or celebrities to take part.

The idea behind it is that the challenging would continue and branch out in order to raise awareness for ALS.

As a sub-note, if you do somehow end up with a Tide POD in your mouth, please spit it out and call poison control at (800) 222-1222.

If the goal of doing this is to try and become famous, than please do it for the right reason by doing something like the ALS ice bucket challenge. If you do not want to do that, at least do a challenge that consists of something that is edible, so it will not kill you.