“I’m taking a bath with my boyfriend,” tweeted one Japanese netizen going by the name of Machiko, uploading a photo with her message. Despite the suggestion of sauciness, however, rather than being something that moderators would quickly remove or fellow users would tag as inappropriate, the image was retweeted and favourited thousands of times in just a few short minutes.
After all, it’s not every day you see a life-sized boyfriend made entirely out of soap bubbles…
Twitter user Machiko apparently decided that she didn’t want to bathe alone on Tuesday this week, so set to sculpting a man-sized figure out of the suds in her bathtub. Ordinarily we’d ask why she’s using soap in her bath at all (baths in Japan are usually for soaking rather than getting clean), but we have to admire her skills here – the best we’ve ever done with our bath bubbles is make a Santa beard or a Mr Whippy ice-cream head.
The creative netizen was soon inundated with messages asking how she’d pulled it off. “It’s really not that hard,” she replied, “when you leave the bubbles for a while they harden a little, so make the base then come back and do the outside part.”
The bath session that followed was apparently very cramped on account of Machiko not wanting her soapy boyfriend to disappear too quickly, but just like in Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman, all sculpted playmates have to leave us at some point. Unlike that traumatising tale, however, this frothy fella’s creator has faith that she can recreate her bathtime boyfriend, tweeting that she most definitely wants to meet him again soon.