Whitney Hand was in her laundry room when she heard her daughter scream from the kitchen.
“It was a sound I’d never heard her make before, and she just kept screaming, ‘Mom!,’ so I went in there, and I didn’t really understand what was going on at first, but she was clearly in a ton of pain,” said Hand, who lives in Atlanta.
Hand quickly realized what happened: Her fifth-grader had put a NeeDoh toy, a viral gel-filled sensory toy, in the microwave to soften it — something the toymaker explicitly warns against.
When she took the NeeDoh SplootSplat toy out of the microwave, it exploded, sending the scalding hot liquid inside the toy onto her face and arm.
“It’s so viscous, it’s like glue, and so for it to be boiling hot and on her skin, I started to try to wipe it off, but it was pulling her skin off with it,” Hand said.
The Hand family’s story is one of many popping up around the country as children have been microwaving the gel-filled sensory toys after seeing the trick on social media videos. Some people have experienced serious burns to their hands, arms, laps and faces.
Dr. Emily Werthman, the manager of the Johns Hopkins Burn Center in Baltimore and a Certified Burn Registered Nurse, estimates she has seen about a dozen such cases recently.
“We’ve seen a handful of these cases just in our burn center alone, and if you ask burn centers throughout the country, they will tell you the same thing,” Werthman said. “Unfortunately, those handfuls at every burn center add up to an unfortunately large number of kids who are getting injured.”
Hand had not heard of the NeeDoh trend and was not aware that her daughter had been microwaving the toys. The NeeDoh website displays a warning: “NeeDoh products are designed to stay sealed and should not be cut open, eaten, heated, frozen, or microwaved, as misuse can damage the toy and create safety risks.”
“I was like, ‘Why did you even think to do this?’ And she said that, you know, she’d seen it on YouTube and that that’s where she learned to do it,” Hand said. “She said other kids at school had talked about doing it, and so it just is a trend that she tried.”
The gel-filled toys can also pop and cause burns inadvertently after being left in hot cars or sitting out in the sun, Werthman said.
“We have to talk to kids about how unsafe it is to be microwaving these toys and how to be careful with them if you leave them in the car,” Werthman said. “We should be really teaching them not to leave them in the car, or on the pool deck, or wherever it’s going to be overheated.”
Last year, the nonprofit Consumer Reports sent a letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission urging it to investigate the NeeDoh toys, which are produced by the company Schylling, after multiple reports of children sustaining burns from the products. In a response to CNN, CPSC did not comment on whether it plans to investigate.
“We are disappointed to see there has been a trend on social media demonstrating misuse of our NeeDoh® products,” Meghann Ellis, the chief financial officer of Schylling, said in a statement emailed to CNN.“Misusing a NeeDoh® product by microwaving, heating, or freezing is dangerous and could cause injury to the consumer.”
Ellis said NeeDoh packaging and online listings include safety warnings, and the company is working with social media companies, such as TikTok, to take down content encouraging misuse of its products.
CNN reached out to TikTok for comment and has not received a response. A search on TikTok for microwaving the NeeDoh toys now brings up a safety warning, not video content.
A YouTube spokesperson told CNN that the company has been monitoring the trend since it first appeared and took action against content that violated its policies. The spokesperson added that content encouraging dangerous or illegal activities is removed, per the company’s harmful or dangerous content policy, and content depicting minors participating in or encouraging unsafe activities is removed under its child safety policy.
A worrisome social media trend
Dr. Maneesha Agarwal, a pediatric emergency medicine physician and associate professor of pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine, said she has personally taken care of children injured by gel-filled squishy toys, noting that the trend — and risks — extend to any gel-filled sensory toys, not just the NeeDoh brand.
“The problem is when it’s a sticky residue, it’s hard to actually get that material off very quickly,” said Agarwal, who works at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “So, when managing these burns, not only do you have to take care of the burn itself, but you also have to get the residual product off.”
These incidents can range in severity from redness like a sunburn to a fluid-filled blister that leaves scars. Gel can splash onto children’s faces, injuring their skin and eyes, according to Werthman.
“It’s incredibly painful for these patients, because these types of burns, just by their nature, are very, very painful,” Werthman said. “It just peels the skin away with it, which is really psychologically disturbing to a little kiddo, if you can imagine.”
Dr. Leah Middleberg , a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, has heard stories about NeeDoh-related burns from colleagues going back to about six months ago.
“The dangers of these challenges seem pretty obvious to adults, but we always have to remember that, you know, kids have been doing risky things for a long time, but it’s just now these bad ideas really spread wider and faster online,” said Middleberg, who is a member of the Council on Injury, Violence and Poison Prevention in the American Academy of Pediatrics.
It’s nothing new for young people to experiment with dangerous social media trends, Middleberg said. For example, the “cinnamon challenge” — ingesting a tablespoon of cinnamon with no water, which led to choking and in some cases, lung damage — was popular around 10 years ago. Other challenges, like the “Benadryl challenge” — overdosing on the over-the-counter allergy medicine to experience mind-altering effects — were popular years ago but are picking up new steam in recent months.
“The best way is for parents (to keep their kids safe) to kind of decide what online viewing is right for their family, and talk to their kids about what they see online,” Middleberg said. “Remind them that just because they see a video online doesn’t mean it’s real and definitely doesn’t mean it’s safe.”
What to do after a burn
The best first step in the event of these types of burns, experts say, is to remove the hot gel, which will continue burning the skin, using a clean towel with cool water. The person removing the gel should be careful to avoid touching the gel and burning themselves as well.
Next, it is important to cool the wound with cool running water — no ice, “no butter, no oil, nothing else on it, just cool water, and then go to the emergency room,” Werthman said.
Some smaller or less severe burns may not require urgent medical care, but those on the face, hands and lap area warrant a trip to the ER, according to Werthman.
“They can appear kind of superficial looking, but because of the way that it sticks, they end up being a little bit deeper than you think they may be,” Werthman said.
After Hand’s daughter was burned, she called their doctor and sent photos of the wound. Their doctor told them that they did not need to go to the ER. They treated it at home with ointment and pain medicine.
But the incident did leave mild scarring on her face and more extreme scarring on her arm. Hand said her daughter has been meticulous with her sunscreen application this summer to avoid additional damage.
“She’s a girly girl, so it was pretty emotional for her to have a burn on her face for a while,” Hand said. “She was pretty embarrassed about it and didn’t like going out, but it’s been healing fine.”
How to help keep children safe
Even if a child does not directly have access to social media, Werthman said parents should still talk to them about trends like these.
“Even if you think ‘My six or seven year old is not on social media, they’re not going to know about this,’ they probably are, because the world is small and they have siblings and older friends,” she said.
Additionally, making sure that toys are used according to manufacturers’ instructions is key, Agarwal said. If parents cannot trust their kids to use products safely, swap them out for different toys.
“Parents need to know what their kids are looking at on social media and talk to their kids about (how) not everything on social media is a good idea to copy or to do,” Agarwal said.
For Hand, the whole experience ended up being a lesson in microwave safety for her daughter, who still loves her NeeDoh toys but no longer heats them up in the microwave.
“She comes and brings me bowls, and she’ll say ‘Is this bowl microwave safe?’ She checks everything now,” Hand said.
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