Popular TikTok cosmetic trend “DIY sugar waxing” allegedly left a teenage girl in Iowa scarred for life.
Natalie Renken, the teenage girl’s mother, told Kennedy News, “The blister was bigger than her thumb and was around three inches tall and then it popped overnight.”
“She is always crafty and making things in the kitchen, so I didn’t think anything of it when I saw her at the stove. About an hour and a half later, Allison had burnt herself. She showed me it. At first, I thought it was a paper towel. But it was her skin that had peeled back,” said Renken.
Her daughter had been preparing the material for sugaring or waxing with sugar. It’s an all-natural hair removal technique involving a mix of sugar, honey and water instead of traditional wax to remove unwanted hair.
“The original video just came up on her TikTok ‘for you page. She hadn’t been searching for it but after seeing the first video she searched for more on TikTok and then did some further research online,” Renken said.
Boles followed the recipe in the video, which told her to refrigerate the resultant appliable substance and reheat it in the microwave several hours later.
However, disaster struck when she was stirring the mixture. Reportedly, the sugar wax popped, causing the hot adhesive to splash on her thumb. She ran over to the sink to rinse off the scruff-scouring syrup. But it peeled her skin because it was so hot. Renken took her daughter to the emergency room straight away.
By that time, a bright pink patch underneath was visible as the outer layer of the dermis had sloughed off after receiving a second-degree burn from the “sugar waxing” experiment.
Surprisingly, she was not the first patient with a sugar-induced injury. “Once Allison told the doctor what happened, he said he had watched the TikTok videos and explained that by putting the hot wax into the fridge, you are essentially flash cooling it. When the wax is in the fridge, for only an hour or two, it doesn’t cool evenly and leaves hot pockets,” Renken explained.
She added, “When you put it in the microwave these pockets are then going to get even hotter but the other bits of the wax will only get warm which causes a combustion reaction which pops the hot pockets.”
(With inputs from agencies)
