Fire cupping

What is fire cupping?

Fire cupping (Dutch: identical) is the form of cupping where the vacuum is made with a flame inside the cup, just before it goes on the skin. With fire cupping the fire does not touch the skin: it burns up the oxygen in the cup, and the low pressure that this creates pulls the skin up.

How the flame makes the vacuum

By using up oxygen. The American National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health describes two ways to get low pressure in a cup: holding a flame in the cup to remove the oxygen before the cup goes on the skin, or placing a small suction device on the cup after it stands on the skin. Fire cupping is the first of those two.

Seifman and colleagues write in The Medical Journal of Australia that the cup is heated with a flammable liquid, which locally gives a low pressure of up to one atmosphere.

Why people choose the flame

For the ritual and for the warmth. A heated cup feels different on placement than a cold one, and the lighting is part of building a scene. In practical terms it delivers nothing a pump cannot also do.

Where it goes wrong

At the fuel, not at the cup. Seifman and colleagues went through the Burns Registry of Australia and New Zealand: of the 18,703 patients admitted there between 2009 and 2016, twenty (0.11 percent) had a cupping-related burn. All but two were flame burns, and in at least nineteen cases fuel was involved, seventeen times methylated spirits.

The severity is the point: on average 7.9 percent of the body surface, seventeen cleanings under anesthesia, eight skin grafts, nearly eleven days in the hospital. Sixteen of the twenty cases happened at home, and the trigger was banal: in the case they describe, a dish of methylated spirits spilled over an arm and caught fire.

So: never put an open dish of flammable liquid within reach of the person or the bed, and use a pump when all you want is the suction effect.

Where this fits on this site

If you want the pulling sensation of cupping without fire in the room, that is simply a different cup. The page about the BDSM date shows how we agree beforehand which sensations are on the table.

Sources

• Cupping: the risk of burns. Seifman, Alexander, Lo & Cleland, The Medical Journal of Australia 206(11), 500, 2017 (DOI 10.5694/mja17.00230). Provides the description of a cup heated with a flammable liquid that gives a low pressure of up to one atmosphere, and the figures from the Burns Registry of Australia and New Zealand: 20 of 18,703 patients (0.11 percent) with cupping-related burns between 2009 and 2016, all but two flame burns, in at least 19 cases with fuel (17 times methylated spirits), on average 7.9 percent of the body surface, 17 debridements under anesthesia, 8 skin grafts, on average 10.9 days of hospital admission and 16 of the 20 cases at home.
• Cupping. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), part of the American National Institutes of Health. Provides the two ways to make low pressure, namely a flame in the cup to remove the oxygen before placement or a small suction device after placement, and the fact that burns are among the known side effects of cupping.

Related terms

• Cupping. The practice fire cupping is a method of, and what the suction does.
• BDSM. The umbrella under which cupping falls as sensation play.
• Blood cupping. The wet version, where the skin is opened first.
• Bruising. A mark with a different mechanism.
• Fireplay. The same fuel and the same flame, but on the skin instead of in a cup; the broader term that fire cupping also falls under.
• Moxa. The other instrument that came into the playroom from traditional Chinese medicine, with heat instead of suction.
• Candle wax is the mild form of heat on the skin, with a melting point instead of a flame.