A first-year NYU student shared a TikTok that's gone viral about accidentally confusing a small bottle of lubricant with hand sanitizer, that he then offered to other students on campus.
Fortunately for Andrew Huang, 18, he said his TikTok about the gaffe led other NYU students to reach out, including some of the people he accidentally lubed. He's been able to socialize and make friends in college during an otherwise difficult time.
Earlier this month, Huang absentmindedly threw a bottle of Astroglide lube in his backpack, thinking it was hand sanitizer. NYU's school color is purple, so he "thought that it was some sort of NYU-branded hand sanitizer bottle," he told BuzzFeed News.
"Some people on TikTok think that my intention was to steal the bottle, but I genuinely thought it was mine and that it just fell out of my bag or something...I always usually carry hand sanitizer in my bag so I assumed it was mine," he said.
Huang said he accidentally "lubed" five other first-year students he came across as they were all trying to figure out how to socialize during a pandemic.
"I didn’t realize it was lube until I poured it on everyone’s hands and we all started rubbing it in," he said. "We realized that the texture was off, and then I checked the bottle to see if it was expired hand sanitizer or something ... We all realized pretty quickly that it was lube so everyone who used the bottle knew."
Huang then, of course, shared what happened on TikTok, where the story immediately went viral. He said he was "embarrassed," but he knew he had "a funny story to tell." People online cringed, laughed, and were genuinely amused.
Since it went so viral, Huang said two of the students that he met that day, Terrance and Michael, reached out to him on social media when they saw the video and they were able to laugh and bond over it.
"I became close friends with Terrance — one of my lube victims — after the whole incident, and then I met my friend Jonathan through Terrance," he said. "And then I met my friend James through Instagram. He DM'd me after finding my TikTok and then we started hanging out, and he then introduced me to his friend Riley. Eventually, all five of us started hanging together and that’s how the group was created."
Huang advises others to please "check the label" of hand sanitizer bottles before you head out for the day. But overall, he's kind of grateful this happened.
"Honestly, I’m really happy that this whole incident happened. I was able to meet a lot of new people after other NYU students started hitting me up when they saw the TikTok. It made the process of making friends a lot easier, and the story is always a good icebreaker," said Huang.
"If it weren’t for this TikTok, I wouldn’t have met my friend group here at NYU."