Firefighters in China have issued a stark warning regarding the alarming trend of setting off firecrackers around plain flour, a practice that has rapidly gained popularity on the social media platform RedNote.
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This activity has been trending for several months, with many young individuals posting videos of themselves posing coolly amid the clouds of flour created by igniting paper or firecrackers.
The videos are often accompanied by captions such as “being cool is a style” and “light fireworks like this when you celebrate Lunar New Year at home.”
Participants typically begin by tossing a piece of lit paper into the air before hurling a handful of flour at it, resulting in a small explosion of flames, which they have dubbed “the art of controlling the fire.”
In January, various government and police department accounts in China published an article to caution against this hazardous behaviour.
A fire brigade based in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province conducted an experiment in which they placed a firecracker atop a 2.5kg pile of flour.