Teen traumatized after ‘sugar waxing’ trend leaves her with burns, scarring

This spoonful of sugar didn’t make the medicine go down.

An Iowa woman is warning about the dangers of DIY “sugar waxing” tutorials after the popular TikTok cosmetic trend allegedly left her daughter scarred for life.

“The blister was bigger than her thumb and was around three inches tall and then it popped overnight,” mom Natalie Renken, 46, told Kennedy News of the not-so-sweet-accident.

The Iowan had reportedly arrived at her home in Marshalltown in February to see 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,” said Renken. “About an hour and a half later, Allison said she had burnt herself. She showed me it and at first I thought it was a paper towel but it was her skin that had peeled back.”

As it turned out, her daughter had been prepping the ingredients for a sugar wax or sugaring, an all-natural hair removal method that employs a mixture of sugar, honey, and water in lieu of traditional wax to trim unwanted tufts.

The resultant pliable substance is intended to be applied to any body part from armpits to legs as if glazing a honey-baked ham.

While originally invented by the ancient Egyptians, this cosmetic technique has subsequently become a fixture on TikTok, which is how Boles happened across it.

“The original video just came up on her TikTok ‘for you’ page,” Renken explained. “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 struck after Boles tried out the recipe in the video, which told her to pop the glop in the fridge and reheat it in the microwave several hours later.

While stirring the mixture, the sugar wax reportedly popped, causing the scalding adhesive to splatter her thumb like napalm.

When she ran over to the sink to rinse off the scruff-scouring syrup, it ended up peeling her skin off because it was so hot.

Horrified, Renken took Boles to the emergency room straight away.

By that time, her outer layer of dermis had sloughed off, revealing a bright pink patch underneath, as seen in graphic photos posted to Facebook.

Fortunately, doctors knew exactly what had transpired as she was the second patient in two weeks with a sugar-induced boo-boo.

“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 explained. “When the wax is in the fridge for only an hour or two it doesn’t cool evenly which leaves hot pockets in the wax.

She continued: “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 at the burns clinic, Bowles had her wound redressed, by which point it had it had sprouted a giant, amber-like blister that eventually burst.

Doctor subsequently diagnosed her with a severe second degree burn, which reportedly took about four weeks to heal.

And while Boles’ skin has since regrown, her mom believes she’ll be left with a ”permanent scar” due to her half-baked mane removal attempt.

In light of the traumatizing ordeal, Renken is calling upon TikTok to post disclaimers on their DIY cosmetic videos.

“I think with every DIY project video [on TikTok] there should be some parental consent or age recommendations on the video just like there are on toys,” she said. “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 added: “She feels deceived by all the videos and research she did [into sugar wax] as they all told her the same thing.”

However, TikTok representatives claimed that said content is restricted to users over 18 due to the inherent danger of the activities depicted.

They added that they also put warning disclaimers alerting viewers to the potentially harmful nature of such pursuits, adding that videos depicting sugaring and other DIY beautification hacks aren’t unique to TikTok and are widely spread across other platforms.

Meanwhile, certain companies offer preassembled sugaring kits that preclude beauty buffs from having to moonshine this potentially combustive substance from scratch.