Randomness begets randomness. McDonald’s should’ve known this when they decided, without warning or provocation, to make June Grimace’s birthday month and have us all join in on the celebration of its 52nd birthday with the new Grimace milkshake. Even though I like the Grimace shake, I recognize that nobody asked for it. And now McDonald’s has to deal with a trend that they never asked for — I’m talking about the Grimace Shake TikTok trend.
Where do I even begin to explain this? It’s… weird. TikTok trends are generally weird, but this one takes the shake (har har) in terms of weirdness. I don’t think TikTok has ever been this bizarre, and this is a platform that had people eating mysterious pink sauce made by a random influencer with little to no culinary experience!
The typical format is this: a person wholesomely wishes Grimace a happy birthday before taking a sip of the new shake followed by a hard cut to a scene in which a shaky camera follows a trail of purple goo to the drinker who now is splattered in purple goo. Bonus points for doing this set to ominous music.
So why is this happening, is it some sort of comment on the quality of the Grimace shake?
Not really. if you watch enough of the #Grimaceshake videos — which have collectively been viewed over 622 million times — you’ll quickly catch on that this trend is exploding in popularity right now because it’s f*cking hilarious, and it’s genuinely fascinating to see the different creative spins people put on the trend.
As far as we can tell, the first Grimace Shake video was posted by TikTok user @thefrazmaz on June 14th, who took influence from a similar video format that started around Burger King’s Spider-Verse burger. @thefrazmaz explains in a follow-up TikTok
@thefrazmaz Replying to @Jonesy I originally made it for a quick, funny, one-off video and a lot of people jumped on board which honestly made it so much funnier #grimaceshake #grimace #mcdonalds #trend #viral #fyp
“It’s an unnatural color, it’s unique and I saw a guy do it with the burger where he took a bite and the next scene was him in the hospital. So I was like, “okay, let’s do something similar.” Fair enough! In the last 24-hours the trend has completely snowballed as TikTok users try to one-up each other, with videos getting more and more bizarre in the process.
Here are some of our favorites, but we warned, if you have an aversion to milkshake-splattered bodies, this is going to be disturbing.
@guaquamolininjabenis He will be grim-missed #grimaceshake #mcdonalds #trending
@voltage15 #grimace #grimaceshake #fyp #foryoupage #mcdonalds #grimacesbirthday #grimacebirthdaymeal #comedian
@rivovershares Belated bday to the manz grimace #grimace #grimaceshake #mcdonalds #scarymovie5parody
@ihatedenise happy birthday grimace
#grimace #happybirthdaygrimace #mcdonalds #grimaceshake #grimacesbirthday #grimacebirthdaymeal #fyp
@zachking grimace happybirthdaygrimace grimaceshake
@belatheabuela0 Lets try the grimace shake #grimace #grimaceshake #belatheabuela
Can you believe people wanted to ban this app? If you see people around your city acting foolish with a bunch of Grimace shakes, now you know why.