First was the cinnamon challenge, then there was the salt and ice challenge, but social media influencers have taken these quests to a whole ‘nother level.

Remember when parents used to have to tell their young children to be careful with Tide Pods? Well, nowadays, the small children get the picture. It’s the teens who have given into a severe peer pressure activity.

The “Tide Pod Challenge” involves someone putting a tide pod in their mouth for as long as they can. The challenge is being done alone or with a group.

The phenomenon began with memes on social media joking about putting Tide Pods in certain foods by their deceiving looks after joking about “drinking bleach” and consuming other poisonous forbidden snacks. Somehow, it came to life. Teens wanted a way to one-up each other or get more likes and followers.

Even though it is portrayed many times on the label, Tide Pods are extremely dangerous. It contains a mixture of ethanol and hydrogen peroxide, a highly poisonous and toxic mixture.

According to The American Association of Poison Control Centers, in 2017 there were 12,299 calls to U.S. Poison Control centers due to exposure to laundry pods.

Those that were exposed to the laundry pods were subjected to projectile vomiting, difficulty breathing and loss of consciousness There are at least ten deaths linked to ingestion.

It seemed teens were noticing that everyday people were getting social media exposure by subjecting themselves to extreme harm, so they wanted to try it too.

“Use Tide Pods for washing, not eating,” professional football player Rob Gronkowski said in a video for Tide.

These videos are one of the many attempts to shrink the number of teens taking the risky challenge. Along with Tide, Youtube is attempting to steer away all of the attention by removing Tide Pod Challenge videos.

Despite what is popular on the internet and could potentially give partakers social media exposure, it is not a great idea to eat Tide Pods.