A young woman in Georgia has found unexpected viral fame after discovering a bead that had been trapped inside her nose for 20 years since she stuck it up there as a toddler.

The woman, identified by Caters News Agency as 23-year-old Hannah Hamilton, described in a TikTok video on 14 October how she had never been sure that her childhood memory was real until she retrieved the same blue bead from her nasal passage after a sinus infection.

Since then the video has received 10m views and 24,100 comments, with another 3.2m views going to her follow-up videos demonstrating the bead and showing it off on a gold necklace chain.

"You know those memories you have from being really little, like three to five years old, that you don’t know if they’re real or they’re something you saw on a TV show?" Ms Hamilton asked in her original broadcast.

"Well when I was like three, I remember sticking a bead up my nose, and being like, ‘it’s not coming out’.I don’t know why, but I didn’t tell anyone... and forgot about it."

She then described how she had suffered a sinus infection and felt a "massive" glob of snot that was painful and would not budge. Using an earwax inspection camera, she spotted a hint of something blue, and the old memory came to the surface.

"When I finally got it out, it was very painful but a bead – a blue beard, that has been in my nose for twenty years – just came out of my nose. Twenty years I have been living with a bead inside my nose, and I had no idea."

After visiting a specialist doctor, she was told that her nose had grown around the bead but that it appeared to have caused no lasting problems.

"This was not his first time dealing with this, funnily," she said. "He was definitely surprised that it had been there for so long, though. He was more surprised by my TikTok fame from this."

She expressed mixed feelings, however, when TikTok’s algorithms recommended it to other users via a push notification on their smartphones.

As of Monday, she had changed her TikTok account description to "bead booger girl", while other users had gone back through her past videos to leave comments saying "the bead was there".

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