The Gross Reason You Should Stop Blowing Out The Candles On Your Birthday Cake

#1 It’s all fun and party hats until you wake up the day after your birthday, sick, full of cake, and miserable.

Imagine if you were about to cut someone a big slice of cake, then breathed all over it. They probably wouldn’t find that cake so appealing.

But when it’s our birthday, blowing all over our cake is suddenly appropriate. We have to blow out the candles. It’s just how things are done.

#2

Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake is a much-loved tradition but you might want to reconsider it, after researchers found that it can increase the amount of bacteria on the cake by an alarming 1,400 percent.

#3

A study published in the Journal of Food Research explored the idea that blowing on a cake might actually spread germs from a person's mouth straight onto the birthday cake's icing, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

#4

Researchers made a fake cake by frosting a round piece of foil, then had people who had just eaten pizza (they wanted to simulate a real party environment, according to the Atlantic) blow out the candles on some cakes, but not others. The frosting on the cakes that had blown out candles contained more bacteria than the cakes that hadn't had candles blown out by pizza-breathed people. The candled cakes also contained more types of bacteria than the cakes without candles, researchers found.

#5

Next came the bacteria counting. The team diluted the frosting with sterile water and spread it out on agar plates for bacteria to grow. Each colony that ended up growing on the agar represented one original bacterial cell from the frosting. (Not all bacteria will grow on agar plates, and there are now sophisticated and expensive ways to count bacterial cells more comprehensively, but this is a classic method that gives a baseline for comparison with past studies.)

#6

"It's not a big health concern in my perspective," study co-author Paul Dawson told the Atlantic. "In reality, if you did this 100,000 times, then the chance of getting sick would probably be very minimal."

Dawson added that while some people transfer a ton of bacteria, others don't transfer any. This is good news, particularly because birthday cake candles are unlikely to stop being lit. Even though you likely won't get sick, we can all hope to have the friends who don't transfer any bacteria. This means you can have your cake and eat it too.

#7

So for those of you that have winter birthdays and who are susceptible to colds, you might want to think about using your hands to fan the fire out or maybe just wrangle someone healthy and have them blow for you. And while watching a little kid take half a dozen attempts to blow out their birthday candles might be incredibly cute, it might be smarter to put their candles only on a cupcake or on their slice of cake so that no one else has to risk the germ frosting. Other candle extinguishing options might include: a small, handheld fan, a gust of wind, a candle snuffer, an old school folded paper fan.

#8

Of course, as we say with most ‘THIS THING IS COVERED IN GERMS’ related news, clearly the germs over your birthday cake haven’t had any negative impact on you yet.

Germs and bacteria are everywhere. Seriously. They’re on your phone, your skin, the doorknobs. It’s kind of unavoidable.

#9

Of course, you also run the risk of appearing ridiculous. Socially acceptable ways of sharing saliva align with existing bonds of trust. Whether it’s blowing out birthday candles or sharing a cup or acts more intimate, such actions usually only evoke disgust when they involve strangers. I can make my peace with a friend blowing out their birthday candles. A drooly, sick stranger, however, oof.