The brand Vaseline recently started promoting their Healing Jelly with an ad on Twitter that featured donuts.
And whether or not their social media and brand strategy teams thought about it or not, the donuts look like, well, butt holes. Specifically a "dry" butthole and one covered in a pearly white, viscous substance.
It's supposed to be advertising how to use Vaseline's products for the skincare practice known as "slugging," a perfectly innocuous method where you trap in moisture on the skin by use of a lotion or gel that blocks the exchange of water and air.
It looks like...not that.
An odd choice for a brand that's a century and a half old, but not unprecedented.
See also Burger King and Nutter Butter. The tweet is still up, but the brand turned off replies. That didn't stop people from reacting to the hilarious image, however.
Folks were attempting to infer what 'slugging' meant, based on the ad.
Others skipped right to the jokes.
Mostly, however, people talked about the marketing decisions that did or did not go into this ad.
Someone said Vaseline should stay in their lane.
Finally, Vaseline itself replied to the initial tweet, reacting to the entire brouhaha.
Vaseline is available in drug stores and slugging is a skincare trend, to be clear.
Jane Rosenberg
Jane Rosenberg
@arianagrande/Instagram
@arianagrande/Instagram