Urban legends from the '90s terrified me so thoroughly as a kid that I haven't touched Pop Rocks while anywhere near a soda in over 15 years. The fear of mixing those two things has been deeply ingrained in me since childhood, as it is every person who lived through the '90s. However, Internet memes revealed the truly villainous accomplice to Diet Coke is Mentos. Anyone remotely familiar with YouTube learned this fact eons ago: Dropping the minty round into the diet soda causes an immediate, enthusiastic eruption. The original Diet Coke/Mentos experiment, which happened back in the long-age days of 2005, has fueled many attempts since, some with various twists. From adorable elementary school science fair projects to outright ill-advised, human-based ones, none rank quite as extreme as this one: Here we have an adult man electively covering his body with mints before lowering it into a full bathtub of Coke Zero. Yep. This is apparently where we are as a society.
I don't know Japanese and there are no English subtitles so I cannot be fully confident, but I suspect this young man immediately regretted his decision. He looks thrilled enough as he slaps the Mentos on (how, by the way? How are they sticking?), but the excitement quickly changes to soul-piercing shrieks once the young "scientist" begins marinating in the soft drink-filled tub. Also, the insane clean freak inside of me cannot help but size up the sticky, widespread mess he creates in the process. That's gonna take a lot of cleaning to undo, dude—but no amount of scrubbing will ever make the memories of this video disappear. Join me in my viewing discomfort, won't you?
