THE CINNAMON CHALLENGE

By: Aurora Faitelli Skogen

The earliest Cinnamon Challenge ever being published on the Internet can be tracked back to a blog article made by Michael Buffington in 2001. Buffington was challenging Erik Goodland to swallow a tablespoon of cinnamon. The point of the challenge involved the attempt to swallow the amount cinnamon without vomiting or inhaling the powder.

On December 22^nd 2001, the award winning blogger Jason Kottke picked up this blog article. By posting the article on his own well-known blog, the Cinnamon Challenge got a lot of attention from people in America. Even so the very first YouTube video version was not uploaded before April 2^nd in 2006. This was a video titled “Pipe Attempts the Cinnamon Challenge”

After this a high number of similar attempts were posted on YouTube. Also discussions and articles regarding the challenge have been commonly seen all over the Internet. Among others, Facebook has an own promotional page for CinnamonChallange.com that has now reached the amount of 8,000 “likes”. In May 2008 Urban Dictionary even created a definition entry for the cinnamon challenge. In that way, the Cinnamon Challenge has become a meme. The dare is also re- invented by the rule telling that is not allowed to drink water or anything else within 60 seconds after the consumption of the cinnamon.

When people try to swallow the cinnamon the first reaction is an immediately puff of cinnamon coming out of the persons mouth. The cinnamon also has an effect that quickly dries out all of the spit, and this makes swallowing very difficult. The look on people faces is often characterized by desperation as they are struggling and trying hard not to vomit. This kind of unmoral behavior is something that everyone can enjoy and find funny without being connected to any kind of a complex system or group. It is also hard to imagine that these kinds of videos can result in any kind of harassment or offend people in certain ways. However we the statistic from Google insight tells us that the search interest has been highest in The United States, Canada and Australia.

On December 14th, 2011 the cinnamon videos saw its largest resurgent since its beginning in 2006. This was a clip re- uploaded by Anna Diaz. In the first two months her video reached over 3.9 million views! In the following weeks, her upload was also imitated by other YouTube users and covered by numerous Internet culture blogs. A lot of other cinnamon challenges that have been posted on YouTube have now got millions of hits. One of them is the video posted by GloZell. Today (02.02.12) her clip has reached the total of 7 893 874 hits on YouTube: