All the pathetic challenges you did as a British teenager, ranked

Doing the cinnamon challenge just to feel something x


We all did ridiculous stuff when we were young and dumb: Crying over boys on MSN messenger, using Charlie body spray FAR too liberally and panicking when we forgot to feed our Tamagotchis. But by far the most pathetic thing we ever did was taking part in all the ridiculous trends and challenges that spread around the Internet in the late noughties and early 2010s.

Why were these even challenges? How were they challenges? WHY did we all do them???

Obviously, we did these as 12-year-olds and are now adults with an actual brain, so please don’t do them. They are, quite clearly, stupid af and most of them were lowkey actually painful. Anyway, here’s all the pathetic challenges we used to do as teenagers, just in case you’d forgot:

9. The chubby bunny challenge

The chubby bunny challenge basically involved getting a massive bowl of marshmallows, shoving them in your mouth one by one and then saying “chubby bunny”. The person who could ram the most marshmallows into their mouth won the bragging rights of being able to say they had a massive mouth.

If any of these challenges were popularised by YouTube, this one for sure was – it started as a tag on there and soon became a key component of sleepovers up and down the country.

In what is quite possibly the most 2010s video to ever be created, for some reason Zoella even played chubby bunny with One Direction:

8. The condom water balloon

For this challenge, you had to fill a condom up with water (who knew they could get that big?!) and then use it like a water balloon. This usually involved your mate sitting down and then you dropping it on their head. The latex was strong so it wouldn’t burst straight away but instead would kind of droop around your mate’s face and it would look like they were in a fish bowl for a few seconds.

I’m mainly just confused about how we all managed to get access to condoms as 12-year-olds tbh.

7. Cinnamon challenge

The cinnamon challenge just involved eating a spoonful of cinnamon, except you quite clearly can’t eat it properly because it’s literally just powder. Instead what happened is you would try to eat it, inhale the powder and end up just coughing it everywhere. Any powder you did eat would coat your entire mouth and throat and make this gross goopy cinnamon-spit that you then had to try and swallow.

Every year seven friendship group had that one person who SWORE their cousin’s best friend’s neighbour’s brother had “literally almost DIED” from inhaling the cinnamon.

This woman decided to take it one step further and literally ate a LADLE of cinnamon. Skip to 1:03 to see the outcome:

6. Planking

It’s not even doing an actual plank, which could mayyyybe be impressive to someone who has never been to a gym, planking was just …lying face-down on the floor? With your arms at your side? Someone please explain.

People tried to spice things up by planking in fun places or on holiday, but honestly how much can you spice up what is essentially just lying down? Come on guys I literally do this for hours every night, it’s not impressive.

5. The Sharpie flash challenge

For this challenge, you had to draw a square of black sharpie on your arm. Then you would put your phone up to the square and take a photo with the flash, and for some reason the flash being that close to the Sharpie square gave you a shock and fully HURT.

We really just tried to shock ourselves for fun? Okay.

4. The salt and ice challenge

Okay this one was lowkey dangerous. It involved putting salt on your body (usually just in a pile on your arm) and then putting ice cubes on top. Some kind of chemical reaction would mean it would burn and feel freezing cold, and you “won” the challenge if you toughed it out and kept the salt and ice on your skin for longer than your mates.

Some people even got full-on burns and scars from it. A big price to pay for a challenge you did in year eight.

 

3. The big lips challenge

We were too young to get lip filler like Kylie Jenner so instead decided to d0 it ourselves with the big lips challenge. You had to put a cup or something of a similar shape over your mouth, and suck the air into your mouth to make a vacuum. You then pulled it off and voila, a DIY lip job! Except it didn’t look anything at all like lip filler, actually HURT and left people with bruised and swollen lips.

2. The pass out challenge

The clue’s very much in the name of this one, we literally just tried to pass out. Why did we do this? How was it cool? What’s fun about fainting???

You had to breathe really quickly whilst squatting down, then stand up quickly with your thumb in your mouth and blow really hard on it, and that would make you pass out. This was for sure the stupidest challenge we all did.

1. Rainbow sick

For some reason we wanted to a) be sick, and b) have our sick look fun. So we invented the rainbow sick challenge, where you had to dye a carton of milk with food colouring and then down it. Then you had to spin around really really fast in circles, until you threw up the colourful milk you’d just drank. Fun times!

Delicious.

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