Durex announced Monday that it’s launching a new eggplant-flavored condom.
Complete with an eggplant emoji, (an emoji that is often used to refer to male genitalia in text messages and on social media), the company broke the news in a Tweet:
https://twitter.com/durex/status/772738319071453184
The Tweet has been retweeted over 7,000 times, causing a stir on social media. Some Twitter users said the company went too far, while others found the new flavor funny. Others doubted if it was real or not.
this is disgusting don't think you're funny
— vinnette (@iloveryutoo_) September 5, 2016
https://twitter.com/EJ_Drinkwater/status/772794803008499712
But the company reportedly later admitted that the eggplant flavor was a joke. Instead, Durex used the stunt to promote their worldwide campaign launched in November that called for the creation of the “world’s first official safe sex condom emojis.” The campaign was launched ahead of World AIDS Day last year, but was rejected by Unicode, a computing system that creates emojis.
“Emojis are a crucial part of how young couples connect and research suggests that the creation of official safe sex emojis are vital to inserting messages around protection into their sexual conversations,” Durex said in a press release at the time.
Fortune has reached out to Reckitt Benckier, Durex’s parent company, for comment and will update the story if it responds.
