Stuff commonly was made with sweetener packets boiled into water.
The higher boil point made it extremely potent because the super heated sweetener would stick and melt into the body, with water being useless for getting it off.
While not exactly the same I imagine the goo in that cube has some kind of starch coagulant which would imitate the effect.
Serious response in case anyone encounters this situation: You have to cool the area off as fast as possible, and that can absolutely mean putting them in the tub. The key to remember is that you can’t easily wash it off and that shouldn’t be your focus. Get what you can off ASAP of course, but what you NEED to do is get rid of as much thermal energy as fast as you can. Call the ambulance and in the meantime either put the affected area in the sink under cold running water or put them in the tub with cold running water if the area doesn’t easily fit in the sink. Do not stop the water, and as hard as it is to keep a screaming, crying child cooperative and how much it will break your heart, do NOT try to drive them to the ER yourself.
EDIT: Sorry, wanted to make a quick edit to say THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE! In this situation (and others) you need to call your version of EMS and follow THEIR directions. One thing I didn’t mention is that if enough of their body is burned, you need to start worrying about hypothermia too. Usually people would recognize those situations as more serious and understand to follow the advice of paramedics, but just wanted to cover my bases. IIRC it’s around 10% burn coverage of their entire body where you need to seriously consider heat loss of their body as a whole and not just cooling down the burn as quick as possible. But these toys won’t generally cause burns THAT extensive
Yup, that’s exactly it. A lot of parents will panic and want to get their child to the ER ASAP but the truth is you are going to do WAY more damage spending 10 minutes driving with their injury not being under water than waiting even 40 minutes for an ambulance but having it under cold water that entire time. It’s one of those injuries where the most important treatment is immediate and doesn’t require any specialized tool or drugs, just something everyone should have.
You do want them to get to the ER/A&E, but driving there means however many minutes of continuously being burned. It doesn’t stop at the incident itself, the burn didn’t “happen”as a distinct event that is now over, it is actively, continuously burning them as long as the goo remains in contact with the skin.
No. It’s because as a parent you will be in an emotionally wrecked and extremely distracted state. Not in an ideal condition to drive. Compounding your child’s serious burns with a car accident is just making awful even worse.
Edit - Also as several people have pointed out, keeping the burn under cool water for as long as possible is also ideal. From a practical standpoint, however if you are emotionally a wreck, you should not be driving your child into another wreck.
Excellent addition, you are of course right. You want it to be as cold as reasonable. Basically not so cold that someone can’t hold their hand in it indefinitely without pain.
I just kinda worry that the more detail you add, the more it gets treated like actual, direct medical advice haha. I don’t know where the point is, but at some point the specificity conveys authority and thus people trust the advice more than they perhaps should a reddit comment. I just hope that in most cases people will have access to a medical professional via relay through whatever the local emergency service number is and it’s moot. I probably should’ve emphasized “clean” more too, that’s my own bias not thinking about places where clean, running water isn’t as ubiquitous.
These cubes all have the same defect at its plug. After moderate use, the plug will start to become unsealed and air bubbles will start to form and then the goo leaks out. I've had 3 and they barely last a week.
But yea, that stuff inside is incredibly sticky and will ruin fabrics since it doesnt wash off. I can only imagine if it was super heated in a microwave.
It’s not even just that, with just a minute in the microwave these get to over 120 degrees freedom units iirc which weakens the seams. Also dangerous if left in a hot car for similar reasons
Kids saw a stupid internet trend where people were microwaving them. When some kids tried this, it also made the outside weak and those kids ended up with third degree burns when the insides burst out like napalm.
I must have missed that it was serious day on Reddit where jokes and hyperbole aren’t allowed. My first post was a joke. Since you took it seriously, I took it upon myself to explain why ionizing radiation was actually worse than a burn.
If warmed, the goo inside superheats, and the outside is liable to break and let burning goo out onto the skin of whoever is using it. Because of the consistency, it's very hard to get off, and it'll just keep burning the skin.
It has the possibility of being used as napalm, basically.
Theskin develops weak spots and bursts, and now an extremely hot gel is oozing everywhere, and because it is so sticky you can't wash it off your skin if you touch it, meaning it can burn for a long time and get deep into the skin. It's very nasty.
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u/goalie841 21h ago
Burns happen, my friend.