So I wrote this post in 2008 that was pretty popular. It was about how silicone lube is flammable. I included a video of our experiment and everything. It was picked up by Wired, Violet Blue, and a lot of other folks.
And then apparently everyone forgot about it or I just reached a new bunch of people who hadn’t heard about it. I tweeted a daily tip as I do every week day and it was about silicone lube being flammable. Oh Megan who is super awesome and totally crush worthy commented on it saying she had no idea. This prompted me to go digging through my archives (not really since it’s actually on my best of list on my right side bar) for the original post, which I then linked her to.
The problem was that the video didn’t work because it had been transferred over in blogger format since that was how it was originally posted – even though I’d had it on youtube as well. So I had to update the video on that post. And this is where fate kind of steps in. Had it been during any other week nothing would have happened. But that particular week I had tried an auto tweet plugin. I had originally assumed that it would just tweet when I published a new post, but it actually was really annoying and would tweet every time I edited a post. So when I edited that original post it tweeted about it. That drove several people to that original article.
So between the twitter accident and the purposeful twitter the word got out again: Silicone lube is flammable! And the web was a buzz of excitement – although not as buzzy as before.
But the really cool thing here is that one sex educator decided to actually contact the makers of silicone lube and see what they had to say and what kind of dangers it really posed. Predictably, they said not much, but I honestly never thought it was all that super dangerous really since I’d never heard of anyone suffering from silicone lube induced burns, but I did think it was necessary to make people aware so they’d be a bit more cautious with it. Especially since I know people who play with fire and also others who use silicone lube for like everything around the house. Seriously, it has replaced duct tape for some.
And just for the fun of it, here is the video again:
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This post, The Flammable Lube Saga, originally appeared on Ask Garnet on 04/08/2010. Click over to leave a comment or ask a question: The Flammable Lube Saga. Thanks for visiting!
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