About

Babies Eating Lemons refers to a series of prank videos wherein parents film themselves feeding lemons or limes to their babies and capture their sour-faced reactions on footage.

Origin

Homemade videos of babies reacting to the sour taste of citrus fruits began circulating online during the early days of YouTube in 2006, with the earliest instance uploaded by YouTuber Stinkerbella on July 8th (shown below). Titled “Baby Eats a Lime,” the video recording features a baby named Holiday at her first birthday party where her parents claim she loves lime. As Holiday eats the lime, she makes a series of funny puckered faces. As of June 2015, the clip has accumulated more than 2.8 million views.

Spread

Later that same year, on August 20th, YouTuber melangelo uploaded a similar video titled "Angelo Eating Lime" (embedding disabled), which has garnered over 2.6 million views as of June 2015.

In 2007, several videos of babies eating lemons became popular, including “Baby Eats a Sour Lemon” (shown below, left), uploaded by YouTuber dsulliv on April 2nd, 2007 which has more than 7.2 million views as of June 2015, and “Lemon baby” (shown below, right), uploaded on May 17th, 2007, which has more than 3.1 million views in the same time span.

"Baby Eats a Sour Lemon" in particular has been freebooted and mirrored several times, and in addition continues to be shared on reddit and elsewhere frequently. However, many of the most upvoted reddit links link to a video, shared in 2011, that is now private. Considering the correlation with search interest, it appears that this video might be where mass interest in babies eating lemons occurred.^[1]

Compilations

Feeding a lemon to one's baby and filming the results became a frequent type of video upload – the most popular videos featuring babies eating lemons are compilations collecting many different baby reaction videos. One such compilation, "Babies Eating Lemons for the First Time Compilation 2013 [HD]" (below bottom left), uploaded by the cute video aggregator funnyplox, has over 24 million views as of June 2015. A search of YouTube for "baby eating lemon" returns over 48,000 results.^[2]

Notable Examples

Babies Eating Wasabi

After babies eating lemon became popular, parents began filming their babies eating other types of things, most notably the spicy Japanese horseradish wasabi. As of June 2015, over 11,000 videos are returned in a search for "babies eating wasabi"^[3]. The most popular such video was uploaded August 18th, 2011 by user lanaxj. It has over 83,000 views as of June 2015.

Search Interest

External References

^[1] Reddit – Search: Baby eating lemon

^[2] YouTube – Search: baby eating lemon

^[3] YouTube – Search:wasabi baby