Who said brands can’t make an impact on Twitter anymore? Vaseline went viral on the platform this week, despite much of the social media chatter focused on Meta's new Threads app, with a tweet that has been seen by many on the platform as an allusion to anal bleaching.

The tweet has generated more than 5.4 million viewers for the Unilever-owned brand and has become a trending topic, with #slugging. 

Slugging, for the uninitiated, is the practice of smearing Vaseline all over your skin to remove wrinkles and otherwise ensure soft, smooth skin. It does not involve sexual intercourse, as some Twitter commenters suggested.

Look back: Vaseline breaks through on TikTok thanks to 'slugging'

Also read: How Vaseline's TikTok strategy reinvented old habits

Nevertheless, Vaseline’s tweet sparked numerous replies and comments suggesting people did not see the image as two varieties of donuts, but rather as a comparison of an anus untreated by Vaseline to one treated with Vaseline.

It's unclear whether the tweet was meant to be perceived as risque. Vaseline, through its PR agency Edelman, declined to comment beyond pointing to a follow-up tweet today that suggested, perhaps in a tongue-in-cheek way, that the brand had no intention of making that connection. An embarrassed emoji is followed by the statement: “Y’all, we were talking about skincare. Thanks for making this weird.” Vaseline did not take down the original tweet.

Either way, slugging has been a social media gold mine for Vaseline, driven in part by its own efforts, but largely by unpaid beauty influencers making a trend, that’s existed for many years, viral on TikTok. At least some of Vaseline’s paid TikTok work has included creators who made the analogy about how slugging makes skin look like a glazed donut, such as a post in December from SaraPlusTwins.

So, as Freud might have said, sometimes a donut is just a donut. But it’s more likely to go viral if people think it’s something else.