25 Outrageously Stupid Internet Challenges That Will Make You Facepalm

Nyquil is great when used as directed, it has solved many a sleepless night caused by colds. That’s when it’s used correctly, but as you probably guessed, the Nyquil Chicken challenge doesn’t do that. This challenge encourages people to cook chicken using boiled Nyquil instead of water.

Along with being just plain disgusting, this challenge also poses many health risks. The ingestion of nyquil in large doses like this can cause hallucinations and even death. Even if you didn’t plan to eat the chicken, boiling Nyquil will cause the medication to become a vapor, making its effects much stronger when inhaled. This can lead to severe breathing complications. 

It seems people will go to extreme lengths to make their lips look more plump and while this one isn’t nearly as dangerous as other attempts to achieve thick lips – we’ll look at that later – it’s still unnecessary. The lip glue challenge involves taking some sort of adhesive liquid, like super glue, and gluing your upper lip to the area between your nose and your lip. This is supposed to make it look like you have thicker and more plump lips.

The challenge isn’t that dangerous, but you don’t have to go to these extremes just for looks and likes. Just be comfortable in your own skin.

This one is rather simple. People would put sunscreen on small parts of their bodies in some sort of artistic way and then lay out in the sun and purposely sunburn themselves. Afterward, the discoloration on the skin would show the artwork they made. The effects that overexposure from the sun can have on your skin are well-documented and aren’t worth the art, no matter how good.

There are plenty of other ways to flex your artistic muscles without putting yourself at risk of skin cancer.

The shell on challenge encourages people to eat parts of fruit and other foods that you would normally discard, like banana peels, eggshells, and, at its worst, plastic wrappers and cardboard boxes. Apparently this challenge originated on snapchat and thankfully stayed there before getting noticed by news outlets. Doctors discouraged participating in this challenge as there are potential health risks with contaminants and bacteria being on the outside of most peels and shells, and that plastic and cardboard are not meant to be consumed.

Thankfully this challenge wasn’t nearly as widespread as news outlets made it seem and there were plenty of people who saw how stupid it was.

The misuse of household objects continues with the Trash Bag challenge where people wrap themselves in a trash bag and then suck the air out of the trash bag with a vacuum until it’s skin tight against their bodies. Despite this being an outlandish thing to do to yourself, it also poses health risks such as cerebral hypoxia, which is a condition where oxygen is cut off to the brain even though there is proper blood flow.

What’s even more upsetting is that there are tons of videos of parents doing this challenge on their children. Great parenting.

While this challenge isn’t nearly as dangerous as most of the other items on this list, it’s still plenty stupid. This challenge has people drinking a gallon of milk in under an hour and while it seems simple enough, it’s actually near impossible for the human body to consume that much milk in one sitting. The human stomach just doesn’t have the capacity for that much of nearly any liquid that quickly and the result is people puking before being able to finish.

Apparently, it’s not impossible to succeed at this challenge, but we still wouldn’t recommend giving it a try.

The Blue Whale challenge is a self-harm “game” performed over social media where a person is given instructions to do increasingly dangerous self-harm-based tasks over the course of 50 days, and at the end of the 50 days, the participants are tasked with taking their own life. The origins of this “challenge” are unknown and it’s uncertain just how widespread its influence has been, but enough people have either died or admitted to doing the challenge for us to believe that it was widespread enough to make it to mainstream media. 

The dangers here are obvious, and if you are having any suicidal or self-harm thoughts, contact the Suicide Prevention Hotline by calling or texting 988, or go to their website here.

This challenge has been circulating around Youtube and TikTok since at least 2020 and encourages people to consume mass amounts of the drug Benadryl to get high and experience hallucinations. Needless to say, people overdose quickly, sometimes consuming upwards of 14 pills in one sitting. 

This, of course, results in children having to go to the hospital and even on occasion dying from the adverse side effects of taking far too many doses. Please just use regulated drugs in their recommended doses, hallucinations aren’t a fun experience to begin with anyway.

Remember when you would try to stick a penny onto your forehead as a kid and that would be impressive to those around you? We wish things were that simple with this challenge. People are taking phone chargers and plugging them partially into the wall and then sliding a penny into the gap, right onto the exposed prongs of the charger.

In the best case, it results in electrical damage and sparks flying, and in the worst case, it can result in electrocutions and massive housefires. How do you even explain to someone that this is dangerous without sounding condescending, don’t people know better?

We really wish this one was just a TikTok trend of people dancing to the famous “Cha Cha Slide,” but no, this is the internet which means it’s got to be dangerous. The Cha Cha Slide challenge has people acting out the lyrics to the song Cha Cha Slide but while driving a car. People will film themselves or the people they’re in the car with swerving in and out of lanes of traffic to the song.

This is obviously very dangerous and results in people losing control of their cars and driving into oncoming traffic. Please just follow the rules of the road.

This challenge is pretty simple, you eat an extremely hot pepper and then film yourself as you suffer the consequences of your actions. This challenge used to be done with a ghost pepper but when the Carolina reaper took the throne as the world’s hottest pepper, the challenge resurfaced as internet celebrities and those that look up to them began chowing down on the extremely hot pepper. 

Eating one of these peppers raw is very detrimental to your health. It can burn your tastebuds, often causes people to puke, and there was at least one report of someone having to be put on oxygen after the pepper caused an asthma attack. Spicy food is great and all, but let’s maybe just enjoy some tamer spices and peppers.

The knife game has had many different names over the years including pinfinger, five finger filet, stab between, and many more, but the game itself always stays the same. The game involves placing your hand down on a flat surface and stabbing a knife into the places between your fingers at various speeds. 

The game is intentionally dangerous and causes a very high risk for stab wounds. Unfortunately there are still people doing this challenge today and it’s been featured in movies, TV, and video games, so it’s unlikely to stop anytime soon. Please just use dangerous objects for their intended purpose. It’s not that hard.

We wish this one just involved tasing yourself, which would be dangerous enough, but this challenge goes even further and proves even more dangerous. The taser challenge encourages people to put a butter knife in their mouth and then use the taser on the butter knife, sending an electric shock straight to the person’s brain and skull.

The most famous video of this sees the person filming the video involuntarily spasming and inhaling before recovering, but not everyone is so lucky. Many who attempt this challenge have to go to the hospital and end up with brain damage, and there are plenty of cases where people have died attempting this challenge.

The hot water challenge is more like a prank than a challenge, and it has caused deaths and many third-degree burns. The challenge has people boiling water and then pouring the boiling water on an unsuspecting victim. This began to get popular after children younger than 10 saw videos of it on Youtube and started doing it to their friends.

Boiling water can cause severe third-degree burns after mere seconds on the skin so pretty much everyone who had this challenge happen to them were severely injured. There were multiple deaths of children as young as 8 years old. 

The concept of planking alone isn’t that dangerous. It has people lying as rigid and flat as possible on various objects and places, photographing it, and then posting it to social media. If it had just stopped there then it’d be a fun little fad that people would look back fondly on, but like with many other things, people took it too far. 

People began planking in more ridiculous and dangerous places. People would plank on light posts, cop cars, and basketball hoops, but it reached a peak when a man in Brisbane attempted to plank on a balcony and fell to his death. It gained traction on news outlets and there was a concerted effort made to get people to stop planking altogether.

Many may think it’s only kids who get involved in these internet challenges, but even adults can do some stupid things for online clout. The alcohol chugging challenge has people, usually college-age, drinking copious amounts of alcohol in one sitting in rapid succession then filming the resulting person doing drunk antics. 

This challenge results in people being rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, and in some cases even proves to be life-threatening. Everyone is entitled to drink as much as they want, but drink in moderation, please.

The Warheads challenge consists of consuming as many sour warheads as your mouth can handle as quickly as possible. While it may seem innocent enough, most sour candies such as sour warheads have small doses of different types of acids, and while not dangerous in small doses, they can be quite dangerous when taken to an extreme such as this. 

The challenge can result in the burning of taste buds and in severe cases can cause blisters and scarring on the tongue. One such case even resulted in a 4-year-old girl burning a layer of skin off of her tongue. Companies that make these candies attempted to reassure the public, stating that the candies aren’t dangerous when consumed normally. 

Kylie Jenner has unnaturally large and puffy lips, and because of her “stardom” young girls in 2015 attempted the Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge. They would place a cup around their lips and suck in, creating a vacuum seal and causing the lips to swell and get larger in an attempt to look more like Kylie Jenner. 

This can be dangerous as it breaks blood vessels in the lips, can cause the skin to crack, and can even result in scarring and discoloration of the lips. 

The salt and ice challenge went around YouTube for a while before mercifully falling out of fashion. The challenge involved covering your hand or arm in salt and then placing ice on the salted area. Videos would show people being in pain as they did so, but the challenge was to see how long you could hold the ice to your skin.

Now, this resulted in burns as the salt and ice combo would cause a chemical reaction that would burn the skin underneath. Doctors even had to warn people that doing this challenge could result in permanent skin damage and scarring, and could even lead to needing skin grafts or in some cases surgery. While the science may be interesting, it’s not worth burning your skin over.

With a name like the Skull Breaker Challenge it’s bound to be horribly dangerous and irresponsible, and yet people do it anyway. The challenge involves two people kicking the legs out from underneath a third person, causing them to fall back on their head and back. This obviously resulted in people getting hurt and sent to the hospital with concussions and severe spinal injuries.

TikTok once again had to make a public statement that any type of challenge that had the potential to cause injury or encourage others to participate in dangerous acts was directly against their community guidelines and that they would continue to take down videos of such nature. 

So doing these types of challenges definitely won’t get you anywhere close to TikTok fame. Please just stop doing dangerous things on the internet. 

Milk crates are very useful for storage, they’re often fairly cheap, and they’re even the perfect size for storing vinyl records. All of which are far better uses than attempting the Milk Crate Challenge. The Milk Crate Challenge began in 2021 and involves stacking milk crates into a massive pyramid and attempting to climb all the way up the pyramid, then back down the other side. 

Milk crates stacked in such a way are very unstable and often people don’t get past the second or third stack before the pyramid falls apart and the person attempting it comes crashing to the ground. This challenge could sustain injuries such as a wrist fracture, a forearm fracture, a broken femur, a torn ACL, or a concussion that could potentially lead to lifelong damage. TikTok even began taking down videos of the challenge in an effort to discourage people from attempting it. 

The cinnamon challenge started sometime around 2001 but it reached its peak popularity around 2012. The challenge is pretty self-explanatory, as it involves eating a spoonful of cinnamon. That’s it, that’s the whole challenge.

The issue and danger here come from the fact that cinnamon was not meant to be consumed that fast and doing so will result in the cinnamon coating your mouth and throat. It will also trigger a gag reflex which would often result in people inhaling the cinnamon into the lungs, which had the potential to cause asthma attacks, breathing difficulties, and in some cases pneumonia. Save the cinnamon for French toast and cereal, kids.

In 2018, Sandra Bullock starred in a Netflix movie called Bird Box that featured her character blindfolding herself and her children before leaving their house. The movie did alright as far as Netflix movies are concerned, but the movie had a much more unfortunate lasting effect on society. The Bird Box challenge started harmless enough, with Twitch streamers and gamers playing video games blindfolded, but it soon spiraled out of control as people were blindfolding themselves and then walking around in the real world. 

Needless to say, this is very dangerous and it ended up with people walking into traffic and driving while blindfolded, which again, is very dangerous. There are far easier and less dangerous ways to gain a following on the internet. Like dog or cat videos. 

We’ve seen people set themselves on fire in movies and stunt shows before, but that’s always done in a safe and controlled environment, and even then it isn’t always safe. So it makes it all the more crazy that people on the internet were literally setting themselves on fire to make videos on the internet. 

The challenge involves coating a hand or arm in some type of flammable liquid such as nail polish remover or rubbing alcohol and then lighting yourself on fire. The idea is that the fire will burn off the alcohol and then extinguish on its own. However, this wouldn’t always happen and the fire would start to spread, resulting in dozens of teenagers and children going to hospital with 2nd- and 3rd-degree burns. Let’s not set ourselves on fire, okay friends?

What could possibly drive a person to record themselves eating a pod of soap and detergent designed to wash the toughest stains out of clothes? We aren’t really sure, but plenty of people did just that. Yes, the Tide Pod Challenge involved recording yourself eating a Tide Pod which was specifically designed to make washing clothes easy, not for eating. 

Obviously after eating the Tide Pod, people’s mouths would start burning and many people would end up getting sick and hospitalized due to consuming the chemicals inside the pod. Tide had to come out and publicly tell people to not eat Tide Pods because “it’s not safe”. You’d think that would go without saying, but apparently not.