Fireplay

What is fireplay?

Fireplay (Dutch: vuurspel) is erotic play where a flammable liquid is briefly lit on or just above the skin and put out again at once. The aim is warmth and a jolt of fear; burning is emphatically not part of it. In Dutch the word vuurspel covers more than the English one: sucking with a flame and burning props fall under it too.

Why fireplay calls for a professional approach

Because the margin between a brief stroke of warmth and a real burn is thin.

Murphy and Cancio show in BMJ Case Reports what alcohol-based hand gel does the moment it is lit on the skin: the flame is almost invisible, spreads across the whole covered surface, and the result is a stay at a burn center with surgery and weeks of recovery. The authors note that fire performances are growing as a pastime and as a profession, and that hand gel should never be used as fuel for them.

That is not a bedroom scene, and yet it belongs here. The mechanism at home is the same: fuel over a large surface and nothing to put it out with. The difference from a stroke on a thigh is in the amount of fuel within reach.

Why the bottle is more dangerous than the flame

Because there is already something flammable hanging above the liquid before you open it.

Log and Moi lay out the physics of ethanol and methanol in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health from accidents with bioethanol fireplaces. Three things from it apply in full to a small bottle next to the bed.

1. The flash point is around 10 to 12 degrees Celsius. So at room temperature the vapor above the liquid is already flammable, and it also sits close to the mixture that burns the fiercest.
2. That vapor is heavier than air. It can flow out of a bottle or a dish and form an invisible cushion of flammable gas near the device, especially in a room with no draft.
3. Refilling is the most dangerous action. That is where things have gone wrong most often in the past: the vapor inside the bottle ignites, and the expansion sprays burning liquid over the person pouring or over someone beside them. That also happens with a burner that has looked out for a quarter of an hour, and at a good distance. Refilling therefore belongs outside the room, and only when nothing is burning anymore.

That comes with the nastiest detail of this fuel. Ethanol and methanol burn clean, with a light blue flame that radiates little, so a small flame is nearly impossible to see in daylight. A burner that looks out can still hold tiny flames. Someone used to yellow flames then sees nothing and refills.

Why the Dutch word means something else

Because it was already taken.

The newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek gives 160 articles with vuurspel, and not one of them is about the practice on this page. They are about fireworks, about Bengal fire, about a blaze. The oldest is in the Bataviaasch handelsblad of 13 January 1864, in which someone walks outside at night and sees “a vuurspel” that he cannot look away from, with fireballs through the air. In 1936 a demonstration with Bengal fire and skiers in the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden is called “Een fantastisch vuurspel”.

So for a century and a half the Dutch word means something you watch, from a distance. That the scene uses the English word anyway is not laziness but precision: fire play says the fire lands on someone.

Why people do fireplay

To let an instinct be overruled.

Almost everyone recoils from fire, and letting that go while someone else holds the flame is the whole experience. Physically not much happens as a rule, and that is the point: the expectation is more intense than the sensation.

• For the person on the receiving end, the gain is that lying still here is a decision and not a pose.
• For the person carrying it out, the gain lies in the protocol, because fireplay rewards order and punishes improvisation.

This is one of the few things in the scene where an accident cannot be solved with aftercare. Anyone who finds it exciting precisely because it is dangerous is right, and that is the reason not to try it on your own.

What fireplay is not

“Fireplay and the Dutch ‘vuurspel’ are the same thing.” Almost. The English word points to the flame on the skin; the Dutch word is also used in practice for fire cupping and for burning props.

“The danger is in the flame.” It is in the liquid, and more so when refilling than when lighting. See the three points above.

“Out is out.” An ethanol flame can be invisible in daylight, and a burner that looks out can still be burning. Do not look, but wait and feel from a distance.

“Fireplay leaves scars.” Usually not, as long as the fuel burns off and does not run out. When the burn is the goal it is about branding, and that is a different act.

What I see of it myself

I’m Victor, a gigolo, twenty-five years in BDSM and trained as a psychotherapist. Fireplay is the subject I get the most admiration and the fewest questions about. People have seen something and want to know how it feels, and rarely how it is built up.

The word itself already causes confusion. When someone asks me about fireplay, half the time she turns out to mean candle wax and the other half a video with a burning flogger. Two very different conversations, so ask first what image is in someone’s head.

What you can do yourself

• Ask first what someone means by fireplay. Candle wax, a flame on the skin and a burning flogger are three things with three risk profiles.
• Keep the bottle out of the room and never refill near fire. Refilling is the action where the most serious accidents happen, and the vapor inside the bottle is what ignites then.
• Assume that a flame that has been put out is still burning. An ethanol flame is small and light blue, and in daylight practically invisible.
• Work with the smallest possible amount of fuel. What goes wrong scales with what lies within reach.
• Lay a wet cloth or fire blanket within arm’s reach before anything is burning, and agree who grabs it.
• Do not make this a first introduction with a new partner. The protocol here asks for someone who has done it before.

Reading more about fireplay

On this site, fire cupping covers what happens when the same flame is used for suction, and edgeplay explains which frame this belongs to. Off this site, the article by Log and Moi is free to read and the only place where the physics behind these accidents is really explained.

Where this fits on this site

Fire is not in what I offer, and candle wax is, so I am not going to suggest a flame to you here. What I can do is work out which sensation you are after, because that often turns out to be reachable in a milder way. How we go through that is on the page about the BDSM date.

Sources

• Ethanol and Methanol Burn Risks in the Home Environment. Log & Moi, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15(11), 2379, 2018 (PMID 30373207, DOI 10.3390/ijerph15112379; full text read via PMC6266291). An analysis of the properties of ethanol and methanol against the background of accidents with bioethanol fireplaces. Provides the flash point of roughly 10 to 12 degrees Celsius, which makes the vapor phase readily flammable at room temperature and close to the stoichiometric mixture; the finding that the ethanol-air mixture is heavier than air, can flow out of a container and form an invisible cushion of flammable gas; the conclusion that the most serious accidents arose during refilling because the vapor phase in the container ignited and the expansion sprayed burning liquid over the user or bystanders; the described case of a woman one and a half meters from a table burner that had looked out for nearly twenty minutes and was engulfed by a fireball while refilling; and the observation that the clean-burning, light blue, low-emissivity flames are nearly invisible in daylight and that a seemingly extinguished burner can still hold small flames.
• Hand sanitiser-fuelled fire performance and thermal injury. Case report. Murphy & Cancio, BMJ Case Reports 14(6), e235106, 2021 (PMID 34083184, DOI 10.1136/bcr-2020-235106; authors, volume and page number checked against Crossref, only the abstract read). Provides the finding that alcohol-based hand gel as fuel on the skin leads to very extensive burns, with surgical treatment and a stay of weeks, plus the authors’ note that fire performances are on the rise as a pastime and as a profession.
• Severe burn injuries caused by bioethanol-design fireplaces. An overview on recreational fire threats. Kraemer, Knobloch, Lorenzen, Breuing, Koennecker, Rennekampff & Vogt, Journal of Burn Care & Research 32(2), 173-177, 2011 (PMID 21233730, DOI 10.1097/BCR.0b013e31820aade7; only the abstract read). Provides the finding that decorative bioethanol fireplaces are recognized as a growing source of fire danger in the home, that the risk is underestimated by the uninformed user, and the authors’ own two clinical cases of severe burns from their burn center.
• De Alabama. Bataviaasch handelsblad, 13 January 1864. Newspaper archive of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, OCR proofread. The oldest of 160 occurrences of vuurspel in that archive. Provides the oldest Dutch meaning of the word: a nighttime fire spectacle with fireballs through the air, seen from a distance. The same meaning appears in the Nieuwsblad van het Noorden of 17 February 1936 (“Een fantastisch vuurspel”, about Bengal fire and skiers) and in the Overijsselsch dagblad of 16 December 1936, which calls a short-circuit fire “een levendig Vuurspel”. None of the 160 articles is about erotic play with fire.

Related terms

Fireplay is the flame on the skin, and in Dutch vuurspel is the broader name around it.

• Fire cupping. The same fuel and the same flame, used to make suction instead of warmth.
• Edgeplay. The frame in which a risk is taken that you cannot design out of it.
• Temperature play. The family this is the hottest corner of, with the cold side alongside it.
• Candle wax. The mild version that is on my list, with wax that arrives cooled down.
• Branding. The act where the scar is the actual aim, and which therefore falls under a different agreement.