A few weeks ago, an image of a pumpkin-spice-flavored condom began spreading on Twitter, bringing with it a cascade of seasonal jokes.

It remained a curiosity until a reporter with Quartz decided to reach out to Durex and its PR agency and ask the question: is it real? She received an equivocal response:

Several emails to Durex's parent company, Reckitt Benckiser, and Virgo Health, the PR company that handles communications for Durex, didn't yield a conclusive answer. A spokeswoman for Virgo Health said she couldn't say whether the company was or was not actually developing such a thing.

Though Quartz has since updated their post, the initial story was topped with the headline: "Durex will neither confirm or deny the pumpkin spice condom."

The pumpkin spice condom was suddenly, maybe real. Others joined in the speculation.

Elite Daily went with a "basic" theme for its take, offering the headline, "Pumpkin Spice Condoms Could Be The Only Thing To Save The World From Basic Children."

Cosmopolitan coined the term "pumptraception."

Three hours later, a Durex spokesperson denied the condom's existence to BuzzFeed, and the company tweeted out its denial.

We've heard talk that we launched a Pumpkin Spice condom. We can't claim this one, but we do love it when people spice it up in the bedroom. — Durex USA (@Durex_USA) September 8, 2014

The truth was that someone had photshopped the image and set it loose on Twitter. That person was Cosmo Catalano, a web developer in Colorado who quickly came up with it as a reply to this list of pumpkin-spiced products from sports editor and New Yorker web producer Caitlin Kelly:

pumpkin spice lattes pumpkin spice beers pumpkin spice muffins pumpkin spice oreo cookies pumpkin spice waffles pumpkin spice kale pumpkin s — Caitlin Kelly (@atotalmonet) September 5, 2014

"I wanted to raise the level of absurdity, and 'pumpkin spice condom' just felt right," Catalano told me. He had no intention of making people think it was real, noting that "The Photoshop work itself was also pretty crude (honestly, around 5-10 minutes)."

Note the sole reply to his tweet:

That's basically what happened. The image was scraped, retweeted and eventually reported, ultimately resulting in Durex having to issue a denial. This is one way rumors emerge on social networks.

Catalano said his tweet received just a few favorites and retweets, mostly from people he knew. But when the Quartz story hit, he realized his image had taken on a life of its own.

And then, a few hours later, the condom and its rumored existence appeared to come to an end. It was debunked by the company, thereby robbing people of the pleasure of speculating that it could be real. As the New York Times recently noted, rumors and hoaxes are "often much more interesting than the truth." On that basis, the story of the pumpkin spice condom is an exception to the rumor rule.

For two months I've been tracking online rumors at Emergent.info, a real-time rumor tracker that's part of a research project at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. I have yet to see another fake story garner so much attention after it was debunked.

Here's our chart of social shares over time for the 14 articles we collected about the condom story. The articles that debunk the rumor are represented in red, while the initial stories reporting that it might be true (Quartz, for example) are those small slivers of orange:

What was different this time? My theory is this story doesn't need to be real for you to fire off one-liners about a pumpkin spice condom. In this case, the debunking was just as much fun as the rumor. Writers could still tee up all of their pumpkin spice jokes, and by golly that's exactly what they did.

Here, for example, is how the Washington Post shared the news:

Did you hear? It's finally pumpkin spice season! (Don't listen to the deniers.) And what better way to enjoy autumn than with a pumpkin-spice flavored condom?

At least that's what social media would have you believe, as a photoshopped image of a limited-edition pumpkin-spice condom endlessly circulated on Twitter and Facebook over the weekend.

The New York Daily News:

Oh my gourd it was a hoax!

The arousal over a pumpkin spice flavored condom made its rounds on the internet over the weekend, but Durex confirmed that the autumnal-themed birth control is fake.

Jezebel:

It is with a heavy heart that I must report that Durex has squashed all rumors that a Pumpkin spice condom has ever existed or will ever exist in the future. And with that news, fall has gotten just a little bit colder and the holiday season seems a little bit duller and much more joyless. What point is Christmas if one can't celebrate with a delicately spiced blowjob or a wintry-smelling safe sex celebration that tingles? What point, I ask you?

New York Magazine's writer used the condom as an opportunity to confess her total basic-ness:

… as a basic white girl who handed over real American currency last night in exchange for a pumpkin-spice-scented Yankee candle at the Bed Bath and Beyond in Tribeca, it truly pains me to break this news to you: Pumpkin-spice condoms aren't real.

MTV.com's story has been shared over 30,000 times — more than any other we tracked — and it took an ambitious kick at the pumpkin spice can:

And though the pumpkin spice condoms aren't real – and maybe shouldn't be – the level of interest around them suggests that the safe sex industry might want to look outside the, er, box for other flavors. If so, we've got a few suggestions.

They followed up with six other flavors "that aren't happening," including this:





The Huffington Post summed it up well: "Even though pumpkin spice condoms proved to be a myth, the Internet still had a field day."

Catalano said it was cool to watch his image take on a life of its own, but said he "didn't love the generational decay of repeated uploads and compressions on some of the copies I saw."

The same could be said of all the pumpkin spice jokes.​