What would Valentine's Day be without a cheesy romantic gesture?
In a move guaranteed to delight hip math teachers writing new test questions, music producer Benny Blanco revealed his V-Day gift to his fiancé, Selena Gomez, in an Instagram post: a trail of tortilla chips leading toward a bathtub full of liquid cheese. The chips also spell out "I <3 YOU" next to the tub, which stands several feet off of the floor.
"When your fiancé isn't much of a flowers girl," Blanco's Insta caption reads. In the video, Blanco shows his perspective as he follows the trail into the bathroom, then dipping a chip into the cheese tub and flipping the camera around to show him taking a bite.
"I love everything bout this.." Gomez commented on Blanco's post. The video was accompanied by audio from "Scared of Loving You" — the first single from I Said I Love You First, the collaborative album that the couple announced on Thursday.
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An Architectural Digest piece on Blanco's Los Angeles house confirms that the video was filmed in Blanco's bathroom, not Gomez's. So it's possible that Gomez actually was the giver and Blanco was the recipient of the cheese, but given the tone of their messages on Instagram and the fact that it'd be far easier for Blanco to logistically coordinate a cheese bath in his own home, let's run under the assumption that he's the gift-giver here.
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to reps for Blanco and Gomez for clarification on the situation. We have a lot of questions.
Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco at Rare Impact Fund Benefit Supporting Youth Mental Health in Los Angeles in October 2024.
Amy Sussman/Getty
How did Blanco get all the cheese in the tub? Did he hire caterers who specialize in nacho cheese? Do said caterers have some kind of cheese hose that can easily shoot a bathtub's amount of cheese into a bathroom? Or did Blanco buy a bunch of nacho cheese from the store and hand-scoop all of that dip into the tub himself?
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What's the plan for getting the cheese out of the tub? Are Gomez and Blanco going to host a cheese party in their bathroom just to empty it out? Or do the aforementioned theoretical cheese hoses have a reverse function? Are the cheese hose guys just standing by outside, waiting to leap into action?
And how much cheese is in there, anyway? Is the tub actually completely full, or is it just the surface with a tray underneath that's hiding the fact that the rest of the tub is empty? How much did this whole endeavor cost?
Unfortunately, this calls for some math. Bathtubs generally hold anywhere from 40 to 200 gallons, per The Home Depot's website. The unusual height of the tub in Blanco's video suggests that this particular tub is closer to that upper measurement. But let's just call it a 100-gallon tub for the sake of easy measurements, and because I have no ability to eyeball liquid volume on screen or in person.
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Walmart currently sells a 107-ounce can of Ricos Gourmet Nacho Cheese Sauce for $10.72 in the Los Angeles area. That's a little under 1 gallon (0.836 gallons, to be precise), and a 100-gallon tub holds 12800 liquid ounces. So, according to our calculations, Blanco would need 120 cans of Ricos Gourmet Nacho Cheese Sauce to fill his tub. That's $1286.40 of cheese, plus tax.
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And who's to say if Blanco used Ricos? Odds seem good that he'd have more expensive cheese taste than the kind available at Walmart. And what if that tub holds more than 100 gallons? It looks like Blanco probably spent multiple thousands of dollars on nacho cheese this Valentine's Day. And they say romance is dead!
