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Don’t Blindly Follow Trends …
A lady from Iowa is warning about the hazards of DIY “sugar waxing” trends after the popular TikTok cosmetic trend allegedly left her daughter permanently scarred.
“The blister was bigger than her thumb and was around three inches tall, and then it popped overnight,” Natalie Renken, 46, told Kennedy News about the unfortunate incident.
The Iowan reportedly came at her Marshalltown home in February to find daughter Allison Boles, 17, “in the kitchen cooking something” when disaster struck.
“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,” Renken added. “About an hour and a half later, Allison said she had burned herself. She handed it to me, and I thought it was a paper towel, but it was actually her skin that had peeled back.”
As it turned out, her daughter had been preparing the materials for a sugar wax, also known as sugaring, an all-natural hair removal treatment that uses a mixture of sugar, honey, and water instead of standard wax to remove unwanted hair.
The resulting flexible substance is supposed to be applied on any body part, from the armpits to the legs, much like glazing a honey-baked ham.
While initially devised by the ancient Egyptians, this cosmetic procedure has now become a staple on TikTok, where Boles discovered it.
“The original video just came up on her TikTok ‘for you’ page,” Renken added. “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.”
However, disaster happened when Boles attempted the method in the video, which instructed her to put the glop in the fridge and reheat it in the microwave many hours later.
While swirling the mixture, the sugar wax allegedly popped, causing the hot adhesive to spatter her thumb like napalm.
Ouch …
When she raced to the sink to rinse off the scruff-scouring syrup, the heat caused her skin to peel off.
Renken was horrified and immediately brought Boles to the emergency hospital.
Her outer layer of dermis had sloughed off by then, leaving a bright pink patch underneath, as evidenced by horrific images posted on Facebook.
Fortunately, doctors were aware of what had happened because she was the second patient in two weeks to suffer a sugar-induced complication.
“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,” her mother went on to say. “After barely an hour or two in the fridge, the wax does not cool evenly, resulting in hot pockets.
She went on to explain: “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.”
Later that evening, Bowles had her lesion redressed at the burns clinic, by which time it had developed a massive, amber-colored blister that eventually burst.
Her doctor then diagnosed her with a serious second-degree burn, which reportedly took four weeks to heal.
Boles’ skin has now regrown, but her mother worries she will be left with a “permanent scar” from her botched mane removal attempt.
Parental Concerns and Platform Responsibility: The Call for Disclaimers
In light of the traumatic experience, Renken is requesting that TikTok put disclaimers on its DIY cosmetic videos.
“I think with every DIY project of a trend video [on TikTok] there should be some parental consent or age recommendations on the video just like there are on toys,” she went on to say. “Allison was very upset and she feels that even though she did all her research, she has now heard other people getting burned [by sugar wax] why aren’t they telling us, that you can get hurt.”
She went on to say: “She feels deceived by all the videos and research she did [into sugar wax] as they all told her the same thing.”
However, TikTok staff stated that the video is prohibited to individuals over the age of 18 owing to the inherent danger of the behaviors represented.
They also included cautionary statements informing viewers about the potentially hazardous nature of such activities, noting that films displaying sugaring and other DIY beautification trends are not exclusive to TikTok and are frequently distributed across other platforms.
Meanwhile, some companies sell preassembled sugaring kits, which save beauty enthusiasts from having to make this potentially combustible chemical from scratch.
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