Don’t snort a condom.

It should go without saying, yet here we are again. In the latest wave of Internet “challenges”, teens have taken to snorting condoms. It involves inhaling an unwrapped condom, snorting it through your nose, and pulling it out through your throat.

 

Condom snorting is not to be confused with the other latex challenge a few years back where YouTubers dropped a water-filled condom on their heads. Posts of teens snorting the rubber gloves go back as far as last October, but the condom snorting shenanigans recently gained popularity after one YouTuber reportedly snorted the latex prophylactic while listening to Taylor Swift.

The trend comes after some kids slurped down tide pods and others guzzled spoons full of cinnamon. Similarly, the condom challenge is not just weird but also dangerous.

 

For starters, the nose allows us to breathe. If you block it with something (including a condom), it could have some serious ramifications. The nose connects to the back of the mouth, and air then moves through the windpipe to fill the lungs. If something is pushed up your nose, there's a possibility it could end up blocking the windpipe. Due to these potentially fatal results, schools in Texas have even taken measures to inform parents of the challenge.

"As graphic as it is, we have to show parents because teens are going online looking for challenges and recreating them," Stephen Enriquez, a state education specialist, told a local television station.

Inhaling a love glove presents a choking hazard. If it’s snorted, there’s a chance it could get stuck in your nose or throat and block your breathing. 

Before the condom challenge was even a thing, doctors wrote a paper on one 27-year-old woman who accidentally swallowed a condom. They discovered this after four months of “trials of antibiotics” didn’t cure her “persistent cough, sputum and fever”. During oral sex, the condom went down her trachea and into her lungs, blocking one of the airways that ultimately resulted in pneumonia and the collapsing of her lung. Then there’s this 26-year-old woman who developed appendicitis after accidentally ingesting a condom two weeks earlier.

But both of those were accidents. These kids are doing it on purpose. 

 

Condoms are really good for a lot of other uses, including preventing unintended pregnancy, protecting against STIs and STDs, and even spicing up your sex life. But snorting them was never one of their intended uses, even if it's most likely you'll poop it out if it's accidentally swallowed. 

What we’re trying to say is this: just don’t do it.