Desperate times call for desperate measures, even if it means risking looking like a fool in public.

A photo shared by a woman in the Philippines recently went viral on Facebook — it showed her wearing all of her extra clothes when her hand carry luggage was rejected for being too heavy for her flight.

The post has since gotten over 17,000 shares at the time of writing.

In her Facebook post on Oct 2, Gel Rodriguez detailed how the check-in staff had informed her that hand carries only allowed for a maximum of seven kg, whilst her luggage weighed a whopping nine kg.

Instead of paying for extra baggage, Rodriguez did what most of us would have done in that situation if we had the guts to do so. She put on all of her extra clothes. All of them.

That meant wearing three pairs of pants, five shirts, a couple more jackets and button-downs.

Her luggage weight got reduced to six and a half kg. With her excess baggage successfully shaved off, she proudly showed off her new #ootd with the hashtag #ExcessBaggageChallenge Accepted.

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As clever as it may be, this trick isn't exactly foolproof.

A British artist known as Ryan Hawaii got kicked off his flight for attempting to pull off the same stunt back in 2018.

He had tried to board a British Airways flight to London wearing 10 shirts and eight pairs of pants, more than twice of what Rodriguez had pulled on. The flight's refusal caused such a huge ruckus that the police were even called in.

Though the staff arranged another flight for him on a different airline, the flight captain ultimately decided to offload him after hearing of his behaviour.

Meanwhile, in 2015, another artist might have had more luck in boarding the plane, but he quickly collapsed from heat exhaustion after wearing six T-shirts, four jumpers, two jackets, a pair of shorts, three pairs of jeans, two pairs of jogging pants and two hats.

rainercheung@asiaone.com