About
The Condom Challenge is a title used for a variety of dare games, including one that involves inserting a condom into one’s nostril and snorting it back through the throat to be coughed out of the mouth, and another that involves filling a condom with water and dropping it on the challenger’s head in order to prove elasticity. The first game gained attention in April 2013 following the viral takeoff of a YouTube video uploaded by teenager Amber-Lynn Strong; the second game gained attention in November 2015 after a Japanese YouTube video earned many imitators.
Origin
On May 3rd, 2006, Break user tommydyhr uploaded a video titled “Condom Sucking From Nose to Mouth,” in which a young man snorts a condom through his nose and extracts it out of his mouth (shown below, left). In the next seven years, the video received upwards of 73,500 views and 130 comments. In the following years, several other condom snorting videos were subsequently uploaded to YouTube, but the phrase “condom challenge” was not coined until May 23rd, 2012, when YouTuber Isaac Mathers uploaded a video performing the same stunt titled “Condom Challenge” (shown below, right). Within one year, the video received over 9,300 views and 25 comments.
Spread
In April of 2013, teenager Amber-Lynn Strong uploaded a video of herself performing the challenge (shown below). On April 13th, Redditor redpanda252 submitted the video to the /r/videos[3] subreddit, where it received over 2,800 up votes and 630 comments in the first 72 hours. On April 15th, Amber-Lynn Strong’s video was highlighted on The Huffington Post,[1] Gawker[2] and BuzzFeed.[6] After gaining upwards of 2.2 million views, the video was subsequently removed from YouTube for violating the site’s terms of service.
On the following day, the Internet humor blog Break[5] posted an article about the YouTube trend, citing YouTuber Isaac Mathers’ video as the first known use of the term “condom challenge.” Also on April 16th, notable condom challenge videos were highlighted on the Internet news blog UpRoxx.[7]
Spinoff
On November 17th, 2015, a video was uploaded by YouTube user David Mouson featuring two unknown men speaking Japanese. One man was standing above the other man’s head holding a condom full of water, and when he dropped it, the condom inverted over the second man’s head, catching most of the original water inside. The video earned over 471,000 views by November 30th, 2015, and as of that day, the origin of the video remains unknown.
Over the weekend of November 27th, the video was posted to many news sites, including Huffington Post,[8] Mashable,[9] and the Independent.[10] Thousands of imitator videos were posted in the following days; a search for “condom challenge 2015” on YouTube returned over 137,000 results as of November 30th, several of which were by popular YouTubers engaging in the challenge and gaining millions of views.[11] On Vine, there were over 500 posts associated with the hashtag #condomchallenge,[12] and on Twitter, over 132,000 mentions of the hashtag occurred in the month of November.[13] On Facebook, a search recorded 26,000 posts regarding the trend.[14]
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]The Huffington Post – Condom Challenge Snorting
[2]Gakwer – Condom Challenge dumbest Thing Kids Have Done
[3]Reddit – The knife fad is old news
[4]UpRoxx – Condom Challenge
[5]Break – Where did the condom challenge come from
[6]BuzzFeed – Condom challenge
[7]UpRoxx – The condom challenge is the condom snorting trend
[8]Huffington Post – This New (Bizarre) Condom Challenge Is Breaking Social Media
[9]Mashable – Internet craze #condomchallenge is at least encouraging protection for teens
[10]The Independent – ‘Condom challenge’ is the latest craze to take the Internet by storm
[11]YouTube – Search: condom challenge 2015
[12]Vine – #CondomChallenge
[13]Topsy Analytics – #condomchallenge
[14]Facebook Topics – Condom challenge