Cupping

What is cupping?

Cupping is vacuum-suctioning skin with glass, silicone, or plastic cups. The dry variant leaves the skin intact; in the wet variant, blood cupping, the skin is opened first. What you feel is like a fierce hickey, and what you are left with is a round mark.

What the suction does to your skin

Everything in the kit pushes, presses, or strikes. Cupping does the opposite: it pulls the skin upward, into the cup, and holds it there. That is a feeling nothing else in the kit comes close to.

The encyclopedic description says cups usually stay in place for five to fifteen minutes, and that on the skin you see pinpoint bleeds (petechiae) and purple discoloration (purpura) form. How exactly that happens is on the page about blood cupping; for the dry variant it is enough to know that the mark comes either way and cannot be wiped off.

That mark is the point for many people: sharply outlined, round, and visible longer than you expect.

Why people use it in the playroom

The appeal sits in three things, and all three work differently than with impact play.

• For the one on the receiving end the gain is that the stimulus stays. A slap is over the moment it is done; a cup keeps pulling as long as it stands there, and that asks something different of you than just gritting through.
• For the one placing it the gain lies in precision without force. You set the spot, the suction, and the time, and no swing is involved.
• For both the image counts. The pattern you set, you still see in the days after.

Suction play with dry cups builds up nicely within a BDSM date, where we agree beforehand whether the round mark may stay.

What cupping does not do

Outside the playroom, cupping is sold as a treatment, and that part is softer than the marketing suggests. The NCCIH concludes that most research is of low quality, that cupping may reduce pain but that the evidence for it is not strong, and that for other complaints there is too little good research to draw conclusions. The encyclopedia is more definite and calls it pseudoscience.

For what you do with it in bed, none of that matters. It is pleasant or it is not pleasant, and that does not need a therapeutic effect to be good for something.

Where the risks are

The side effects the NCCIH names are concrete: lasting skin discoloration, scars, burns, and infections, and worsening of eczema or psoriasis. Rare but reported are bleeds under the skull and anemia from blood loss with the wet variant.

There is one point that stands out above the rest in this context. The same source warns that using the same gear on more than one person, without sterilization in between, can spread bloodborne diseases like hepatitis B and C. That also holds for cups that sit in a cabinet and get used by several people.

Xu and colleagues found, in their overview of 308 reported adverse events from acupuncture, moxibustion, and cupping, ten of which were about cupping, that infections were the leading complication.

Practical: your own cups, or cups that are really cleaned between people. And a small flame asks for extra care, because a cup that is too hot gives a burn instead of a suction mark.

Where blood cupping differs

The moment scratches or pricks come under the cup, the category changes. Then it is no longer about suction on intact skin but about blood play, with sterile single-use material, gloves, and a conversation about STD status beforehand. That step is worked out on the page about blood cupping.

Whoever starts with cupping starts with the dry variant. By then you already know how your skin reacts to suction before you add anything to it.

Misconceptions about cupping

“Those marks are bruises.” They look like it, but no blow was involved. It is the suction that makes the discoloration, and that also explains why the edge is so sharp.

“Cupping draws toxins out of your body.” There is no evidence for that. The NCCIH states that the research on cupping is largely of low quality and that conclusions about health effects cannot be drawn from it.

“If the skin stays intact, nothing can be transmitted.” That is not true as long as the cups are shared. The skin does not open, but the cup does touch two people one after another.

What you can do yourself

• Start with silicone cups. You squeeze them and let go; you dose the suction with your hand, without a pump or fire.
• Keep the first time short. Five minutes on one spot already tells you enough about how your skin reacts.
• Do not put a cup on thin or damaged skin, and not twice in a row on the same spot.
• Agree on whether marks are allowed. A cup mark is round, dark, and visible for days, even if you wanted to go to the sauna the next day.

Sources

• Cupping. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), part of the American National Institutes of Health. Provides the dry/wet distinction, the finding that most research is of low quality, the side effects, and the warning about shared, non-sterilized gear and hepatitis B and C.
• Adverse Events of Acupuncture: A Systematic Review of Case Reports. Xu, Wang, Cooper et al., Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2013, article 581203. 308 reported adverse events from 25 countries, ten of them about cupping; infections were the leading complication.
• Cupping therapy. Wikipedia. Provides the usual duration of five to fifteen minutes, the naming of the skin effects as petechiae and purpura, and the finding that there is no conclusive evidence for the claimed health effects.

Related terms

• Blood cupping. The same cups over small scratches, with the risk profile that comes with it.
• Blood play. The category you step into the moment the skin opens.
• Bruising. The other way to leave a mark, with a very different mechanism.
• Fire cupping. The same suction, but with a flame in the cup, and the burn risk that comes with it.
• Scarification. The opposite of cupping: here the scar is the goal.