Chemical play

What is chemical play?

Chemical play is erotic play where a stinging substance is put on or in the body to bring up a sensation. Ginger, menthol, capsaicin and wintergreen oil are the common agents. The stimulus comes from chemistry, not from a slap and not from heat or cold. English borrowed the name straight from the scene, and Dutch never coined one of its own.

What chemical play looks like in practice

Usually as something small on a small patch of skin, long before anything else happens.

A common sequence: you get a stripe of menthol balm on the inside of your forearm, and then nothing happens for a quarter of an hour. That quarter of an hour is the test. No rash and no swelling, and the same agent is allowed somewhere else later. If something does show up, it happened on a forearm and not somewhere you cannot reach. With ginger play it works differently, because a peeled root goes in all at once and there is no small version of that.

The agents vary widely in strength. Menthol sits on every drugstore shelf, capsaicin cream is a medicine, fresh ginger is in the vegetable aisle. Chemical play is the cheapest corner of BDSM, and right away the corner where people are quickest to bring something home without knowing what it does.

Why a substance burns without anything getting warm

Because the molecule sits directly on the wiring that carries temperature.

Michael Bandell and colleagues described in Neuron how that is laid out. Capsaicin, the pungent compound from chili pepper, opens TRPV1, the channel for harmful heat. Menthol opens TRPM8, the channel for cold. And the pungent compounds from cinnamon oil, wintergreen oil, clove oil, mustard oil and ginger all open TRPA1, a third channel that usually answers to harmful cold.

That is where the whole mechanism of chemical play sits. No tissue gets heated and no tissue gets cooled. A switch flips, and your head gets the message that belongs to that switch. The same researchers showed that cinnamaldehyde, the most specific of those compounds, fires up the very nerve cells that also react to cold. That is also why fierce cold sometimes feels like burning.

What it does not explain is the second family. Some agents really do something to the tissue itself, and then you are no longer dealing with a signal.

Why people do chemical play

Because the stimulus keeps going while nobody is doing a thing.

With a slap, a clamp or a hand you can tell when it stops. Not here. The substance is on your skin, the person beside you can walk half a meter away, and the feeling just keeps running. For anyone after surrender that is a very direct route. There is nothing to steer and nothing to wait out.

• For the one receiving it the attention shifts to one spot and stays there, because nothing passes by that you can just bite through.
• For the one applying it there is barely any technique to it, which makes it appealing to anyone who feels unsure about their own hand.
• For a couple it puts all the weight on the talk beforehand, because once it is running there is nothing left to negotiate.

That last point is also exactly what chemical play does not fix. A couple that skips the talk beforehand will not learn to have it here. It only shows up more clearly. If you do not yet know where your upper limit lies, this is a poor place to go find out.

What chemical play is not

“Chemical play and chemsex are the same thing.” Two different things. The Trimbos Institute uses for chemsex the definition from Soa Aids Nederland and Mainline: the use of substances by men who have sex with men, with the specific intention of having sex, and leaving out alcohol, poppers, laughing gas and cannabis. There it is about what a substance does to your head. With chemical play it is about what a substance does to your skin, and nothing gets ingested.

“It is natural, so it can do no harm.” It is exactly the products you buy without a prescription that produced the most serious cases. Rohan Desai and colleagues show in Cureus how far an ordinary muscle balm with methyl salicylate and menthol can go when it stays on for days on skin that does not feel the irritation coming. Anyone with nerve damage or diabetes misses the warning signal at the exact spot where it is needed. That same article carries the 2012 American warning it goes back to: 43 reported cases of burns, first to third degree, mostly with products holding more than three percent menthol or more than ten percent methyl salicylate.

“A safeword is enough.” A safeword stops a hand. It does not take balm off your skin or a root out of your body. Wiping helps, water usually does not, and the feeling lingers after that. That makes chemical play the branch of sensation play where the real means of control lies before the session and not inside it.

What I see of it myself

I am Victor. Gigolo, well over twenty-five years in this world, and a psychotherapist by background. Questions about this almost never reach me as “I want this”, but as “can I ask something without you doing it right away”. That is always fine.

Nearly everyone asks about the intensity. Almost no one asks about the duration. And the duration is what makes the difference. Anyone who has already tried something off the shelf has almost always used it undiluted. That is where it goes wrong, not during the session.

What you can do yourself

• Test every agent first on the inside of your forearm and wait a quarter of an hour, even if you already know the agent from the bathroom.
• Dilute every oil in a neutral carrier oil and do not trust what the packaging says about dosage, because that is about sore muscles and not about this.
• Keep everything away from mucous membranes, so eyes, genitals and anus, unless the agent is expressly meant for that as with figging.
• Set out beforehand what you will take it off with. A neutral oil and a dry cloth work. Water spreads most of these substances sooner than it removes them.
• Agree how long it stays on and who watches that, because here the clock is the means of control and not the hand.
• Call a doctor the moment blisters come up, the skin swells or it does not ease after an hour, and bring the packaging.

Learn more about chemical play

On this site each agent has its own page. Figging explains why ginger comes up slowly and sinks away after about twenty minutes, and peppermint oil covers the cold that is not cold. The umbrella above it sits at sensation play.

Off this site, the article by Bandell and colleagues is the best piece for grasping why so many different plants do the same thing, and the article in Cureus shows in two pages how a drugstore product can go off the rails.

Where this fits on this site

If you are unsure whether this is something for you, that does not have to be a decision yet. It can just stay a question. How an evening is built up and who decides what comes into it is described at the BDSM date.

Sources

• Noxious cold ion channel TRPA1 is activated by pungent compounds and bradykinin. Bandell, Story, Hwang, Viswanath, Eid, Petrus, Earley & Patapoutian, Neuron 41(6), 849-857, 2004 (DOI 10.1016/s0896-6273(04)00150-3, PMID 15046718). Supplies that capsaicin activates the heat-sensitive TRPV1 and menthol the cold-sensitive TRPM8, that the pungent compounds from cinnamon oil, wintergreen oil, clove oil, mustard oil and ginger all five activate TRPA1, that cinnamaldehyde is the most specific TRPA1 activator and switches on a subset of sensory nerve cells strongly enriched in cold-sensitive cells, and that activation of TRPA1 yields a painful sensation, which explains why harmful cold can paradoxically be felt as burning.
• From Chemical Burn to Below Knee Amputation. Amputation Secondary to Application of Over-the-Counter Topical Analgesic With Menthol and Methyl Salicylate. Desai, Gutierrez, Cherukuri, Guzman & Deoker, Cureus 13(12), e20191, 2021 (DOI 10.7759/cureus.20191, PMID 35004014). Supplies the finding that an over-the-counter balm with methyl salicylate and menthol can cause severe chemical burns under daily, prolonged application, and that the risk climbs sharply for anyone who, through diabetes or nerve damage, does not feel the irritation. It also carries the account of the 2012 American safety warning about over-the-counter agents with menthol, methyl salicylate or capsaicin: 43 reported cases of first to third degree chemical burns, with second and third degree occurring more often at concentrations above three percent menthol or ten percent methyl salicylate.
• Factsheet over chemsex. De combi seks en drugs. Trimbos-instituut, 30 maart 2022. Supplies the definition of chemsex as used in the Netherlands, from Soa Aids Nederland and Mainline: “Het gebruik van (een combinatie van) middelen door MSM met de specifieke intentie seks te hebben, met uitzondering van alcohol, poppers, lachgas en cannabis”, together with the list of substances it covers. It supplies, in that way, the line between chemsex and chemical play.
• Krantenarchief van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek, queried via the SRU service on the newspaper-articles collection, 10 augustus 2026. Chemical play returns zero articles and chemicaliënspel zero. Chemisch spel returns two, both read through in the OCR and both about chemistry: Limburgsch dagblad of 3 juni 1959 on the processing of coal by the state mines, and Het Parool of 17 juni 1989 on a pesticide that reacts with water in the bottle to form a thiol. Supplies the finding that Dutch has no word of its own for this practice.
• Gember in je reet tijdens de seks? Dit is alles wat je moet weten over figging. Spuiten en Slikken, BNNVARA, 11 februari 2025. Supplies that the Dutch-language scene uses the English term chemical play untranslated, and its description as play where stinging substances are put to work to bring up a sensation.

Related terms

• Sensation play. The umbrella that chemical play is a branch of, with the mechanical stimuli beside it.
• Figging. The best-known member, with the pharmacology of ginger and the nineteenth-century origin of the word.
• Ginger play. The same member under its Dutch name, with the three motives a kink educator ties to it.
• Peppermint oil. The agent that reports cold instead of heat, and that makes the skin more permeable at the same time.
• Temperature play. The neighboring branch where the heat and the cold are actually real.
• Candle wax. A substance on the skin that works with real heat, and so with a real burn risk.
• Edgeplay. Where chemical play ends up the moment it involves mucous membranes or concentrated agents.
• Aftercare. Why you want something neutral on hand after this kind of play.