Malcolm Owen
A celebrity in the UK accidentally swallowed an AirPod on Sunday, mistakenly consuming the Apple wireless earbud along with her vitamins.
AirPods are known for being small and white, and at a distance could be mistaken for a pebble or a large pill. On Sunday, one of the personal audio accessories had the misfortune of being treated as an edible tablet.
Posted to Twitter on Sunday and spotted by iMore, UK property show TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp admitted that she had "just swallowed an AirPod while downing my vitamins." After telling her followers "I don't recommend it," Allsopp said she didn't need to go to the hospital as she managed to throw it up.
The celebrity quickly recovered from the ordeal, but added "my throat is really quite sore."
In follow-up posts, Allsopp responded to followers and other Twitter reactions about the ordeal. The messages included a confirmation that the AirPods still work, albeit it "smells of sick."
She also explained that she had put her vitamins in her pocket while getting a glass of water, but then pulled the vitamins and the AirPod from her pocket before swallowing the collection down. A photo was also published to the platform, showing an AirPod mixed in with a selection of tablets and pills, demonstrating that it is plausibly easy to make such a mistake.
See, not quite as daft as some might say. pic.twitter.com/Gw0qSj8BOV
— Kirstie Allsopp (@KirstieMAllsopp) June 27, 2022
Allsopp is not the only person to have accidentally consumed an AirPod. In February 2021, a Massachusetts man ended up visiting the emergency room after swallowing an AirPod in his sleep.
In November, a TikTok user admitted to having mistaken an AirPod for Ibuprofen and swallowing it. Despite being consumed, the AirPod continued working, and a voice memo recorded gurgling sounds from inside her stomach.
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11 Comments
Kirstie Allsopp loves attention and is willing to say/do pretty much anything to get it.
If celebrity is the same thing as routinely being in the tabloids for saying or doing stupid things then yeah, I guess she's a celebrity.
I'd hoped that a tech news site wouldn't be so interested into these kind of moronic stories about morons.
At one point in my life I had to take large numbers of pills several times per day. My first reaction to this story was: You don't down the whole handful at once.
I mean seriously, you take two or three at a time with a gulp of water. It reduces the chance of choking on them. If she'd done that she'd have noticed one was shaped really weird for a pill. Looking at the pile of pills she presumably had to take, yes it was daft that she could make this mistake.
Hopefully this situation can be resolved in iOS 16 with the new medication category in the health app.
The Nintendo Switch cartridges are coated in a bittering agent to discourage children from sucking on them. Maybe Apple should do the same for AirPods to stop real estate celebrities from swallowing them amongst their fistfuls of prescription drugs.