Claim: A mixture of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and Mountain Dew will produce a brilliant glow.
Examples:
[Collected via e-mail, July 2012]
For camping or late nights at the beach? Leave 1/4 of Mountain Dew in bottle (just don't drink it all), add a tiny bit of baking soda and 3 caps of peroxide. Put the lid on and shake - walla! Homemade glow stick (bottle) solution.
[Collected via e-mail, October 2007]
My son told me about this video clip that claims that you can make Mountain Dew Glow with just a little bit of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. The clip is fairly convincing, but the chemistry doesn't make sense to me. Is this a hoax?
Origins: The notion that mixing small amounts of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide into some Mountain Dew soda will produce a brilliantly glowing solution is a Fool's Errand, a bit of flimflammery intended to send the gullible out to fulfill an absurd and impossible task. The glowing Mountain Dew jape circulated on the Internet in 2007 in the form of the video clip shown above, and it made the rounds of Facebook in 2012.
There is nothing in ordinary carbonated soda that would cause it to fluoresce simply through the introduction of a little baking soda and hydrogen peroxide. And since most sodas generally have the same basic composition with only relatively slight differences in flavorings and coloring, it's unlikely Mountain Dew would possess any unique chemical properties that would cause it to act differently from similar carbonated beverages in this regard. For the sake of thoroughness, however, we replicated the process ourselves and recorded the results to show that it produces no remarkable outcome:
The results claimed in the original video were likely created by the surreptitious introduction of a glow solution into the Mountain Dew bottle, either through off-screen manipulation or via a substitution covered by editing.
