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Is there some kind of fad or meme going around about how letting the sun shine on your butthole is supposed to be good for you? I saw a recent TikTok about it, but I can’t tell if it’s real or a spoof. —Sunny
Readers may recall a mid-2000s wellness fad known as “ear candling.” Patients lay on their side with a special candle inserted in their ear, which was then lit and allowed to burn down, allegedly drawing out unspecified impurities.
This practice inspired my own variation, “ass candling,” where the afflicted would adopt a face-down, ass-up posture as I walked among them, beneficently shoving torches in their asses and setting them aflame. This would not only have drawn impurities out of the patient’s colon, but would hopefully pull some cash out of the adjacent wallet as well.
Sadly, my ass candling scheme never came to fruition,* but I still find it a bit galling that 15 years later someone would come along and pull essentially the same scam without even bothering with the initial cash outlay for torches. The modern, equipment-free version is called “perineal sunning” in polite company, or, after a few beers, “butthole tanning.” It first gained widespread exposure (ahem) in late 2019 with an Instagram post from spiritual/wellness influencer Ra of Earth.
To Ra’s credit, he appears to have been neither a charlatan nor a prankster, just a dude with some pretty wacky but sincerely held ideas about energy and chakras and shit. That said, I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that there’s no allopathically plausible mechanism by which mooning the sun might improve health outcomes.
The video and its memeified follow-ups made the rounds in late 2019 before fading from the public imagination. However, taint-basking roared back in 2022, with videos on the subject once again racking up millions of views on TikTok. And now, Sunny, you’re telling me that the topic seems to be drawing attention yet again in 2025.
This suggests that cheek-spreading follows a three-year cycle: We should expect the next peak in late 2028. Will this coming tsunami of ass exposure correspond with the three-quarters point of the solar-activity cycle that began in 2019? Will it commemorate the awarding of the triennial De Morgan Medal for mathematics, due again that year? Or will it merely be a salute to the departing president’s motorcade? Time will tell, but I know which one my money’s on.
*That said, I really did register the domain “asscandling.com,” though only to be a wiseass.
Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.
