How to Skin a Watermelon… Kinda

Cool watermelon tricks are all the rage on YouTube—like watermelon sculptures or watermelon kegs or watermelon cubes. Whatever watermelon manipulation you can dream of, it's probably happening. And with summer winding down, it's important to get all those last watermelon trick videos in now before a bunch of YouTube hackers coopt them as pumpkin tricks.

Yesterday, the above cool "skin a watermelon" party trick hit YouTube, showing a halved rind being pulled perfectly from either side of untouched watermelon flesh. It's a pretty awesome visual; however, like many things that appear too good to be true, it's too good to be true.

Skinning a watermelon is definitely less of a "hack" and more of a "trick," being that it involves using two different watermelons of equal size. To create the illusion, you have to peel the rind off one watermelon while hallowing out the other one.

The final result is certainly striking (and I have a sneaking suspicion that it's slightly harder than the video makes it out to be), but as any magician will tell you, a trick loses its luster once people know how it's done, and if this video continues to go viral, you'll probably hear more people saying "oh, I saw that on YouTube" than "oh, that looks awesome."

But hey, at least this seems like one that can't be stolen by the pumpkin people.