Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Before the Tide Pods challenge was a public health crisis, it was a joke. The laundry detergent capsules, which were originally released in 2012, evolved over time to look strangely delicious: lush green and blue gels, swirled around one another attractively, all but daring you to eat them. This led to many jokes about Tide Pods maybe secretly being candy, and it might have stopped there — but then people actually started eating them. The “Tide Pods challenge” surged on social networks in 2018, and ultimately more than 10,000 children were reported to have been exposed to whatever extremely inedible substance is actually inside Tide Pods. Of teenagers who were affected, more than a quarter of the cases were intentional, the Washington…