Warning: This story contains images that may be NSFW.
Because it’s been a whole eight months since the one-finger selfie challenge, which is a lifetime in silly internet games, the time is now upon us to usher in a new selfie trend that will make you simply wonder why. (Or maybe why not?) I present to you the heart-shaped boob challenge.
It is exactly what you think, well, with maybe less cleavage. Women are cupping their hands into hearts and squeezing their boobs into said heart. Or something like that.
This is big on Weibo, which is essentially China’s version of Twitter. It started with a more modest bodily challenge sweeping social media that involved the flexibility of fingers and quickly devolved from there. Internet lore has it that livestream hostess Ayi Xi Tai Lǜ did the heart trick to gain more fans back in July, and the photo spread on Chinese message boards. For the uninitiated, hostesses on Chinese social media usually operate these livestreams after midnight and viewers can pay them with such tokens as “love” and “lollipops,” according to SupChina.
Anyway, pornography is banned in China, but that didn’t stop the trend from taking off on Weibo. Or at least for people trying to look for that trend. The site What’s Next on Weibo reports that over 1.5 million people have viewed posts under the Mandarin-language equivalent of the hashtag #HeartShapedBoob, but not nearly as many people have posted actual photos. And if people were trying to do so right now, they’d show up as empty images because they’re being censored.
But there were a few early adopters who were able to pass censorship (no nipples is the arbitrary universal rule, right?). Men included.
May the next nudie selfie challenge be something as mysterious and innocuous as elbows or ankles. But really, anything that doesn’t bring the dick pic into focus is absolutely fine.