Temperature play

What is temperature play?

Temperature play is the form of BDSM in which heat and cold are used on bare skin to make you feel something rather than to hurt you. It is about the difference from your skin temperature, not about the extreme setting. Candle wax, ice cubes, warmed metal, and fire are all versions of it.

What temperature play looks like in practice

Usually with two stimuli that alternate, and almost always blindfolded.

The English-language encyclopedia describes it as stimulating the heat and cold receptors with objects and substances, for the feeling and not for the pain, with water, melted wax, and ice as the usual means. It adds that a blindfold heightens the sensations and that ordinary candles are discouraged in favor of massage candles.

Three forms get their own heading: fireplay, ice play, and exposure without any object. Being wrapped up, or standing naked in the cold. The first counts as edgeplay, the second is in every freezer. That is why “temperature play” on a kink list still tells you nothing.

Why warm next to cold burns

Because the body does not add the two together but settles one against the other, and that settling ends badly.

This has been measured, and long ago. In the thermal grill illusion, first demonstrated by Thunberg in 1896, you produce “a sensation of strong, often painful heat” by laying alternating warm and cool bars against the skin. Only warm: warm. Only cool: cool. Mixed together: burning.

A. D. Craig and M. C. Bushnell showed in Science where that comes from. They measured two kinds of ascending nerve pathways that respond to cold and saw them respond differently to the grill. Their explanation is central disinhibition: the warm signal removes a brake that normally suppresses the cold-pain signal, and what comes through is the burning pain that cold already produces. The prediction from that, a fixed ratio between grill pain and cold pain, held up psychophysically.

For this practice that means something concrete: the burning when you alternate quickly is real, and it comes from the cold side. The skin does not get confused. A brake comes loose.

Why people do temperature play

For the half second in which you do not yet know what is lying on your skin.

That is the whole appeal, and the reason the blindfold comes standard.

• For you it is one of the few forms in which you have to endure nothing: no limit is being sought out, something is touched that you never consciously feel.
• For me it is the play with the smallest margin between lovely and wrong. Two degrees in the wax decide whether it becomes warmth or a burn.
• For the two of us together it is a good first step, because no role or scenario is involved, and no pain.

What it does not do: build up. The skin gets used to it fast, and the urge is then to go hotter. That is where the problem sits.

Where the limit is: one degree

Between “this feels warm” and “this is a burn” there is about one degree.

The numbers the scene works with are 43 °C for pain and 44 °C for a burn, and with Martin and Falder those sit so close together that there is nothing to notice in between.

And the rule beneath it is notorious. Martin and Falder wrote their review precisely because the 1947 work of Moritz and Henriques had been misread for years, after which misleading versions of the time-temperature rule ended up in industrial standards, in burn-injury education, and in medical-legal advice.

Two things are settled. Temperature weighs more than time: the rate of damage increases logarithmically as the degrees rise in a straight line, and Torgrim Log arrives at the same asymmetry in his modeling study. And the pain is no reliable margin: Martin and Falder place it just below the damage threshold, Log with 44.8 °C just above it. Two sources, two sides of the same line.

From that follows the one rule of thumb that covers all the versions at once: if it is not enough, extend the time and not the temperature.

What temperature play is not

“If it does not hurt, it is safe.” The pain comes only one degree before the burn, and how briefly a drop touches the skin decides the rest. On top of that, the research everyone leans on, Moritz and Henriques, 1947, was according to Martin and Falder misread for years, and misleading versions of the time-temperature rule ended up in standards and education. “She said nothing” is therefore not a measurement.

“Hotter is more intense.” Hotter is logarithmically more damaging and only slightly more intense. The stimulus is in the difference from your skin temperature, and that difference is already amply present at 45 °C.

“BDSM people can take more heat.” The encyclopedia entry on temperature play claims that too, citing a 2022 systematic review for it. In the abstract of that review, Wuyts and Morrens in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, all it says is that pain thresholds turn out to be higher in submissive participants; about heat it says nothing, and the rest sits behind a paywall. Do not count on it.

What I make of it

This is the play I most often start with for someone who has tried nothing yet. I’m Victor, a gigolo and psychotherapist, and I do candle wax but not fire.

The reaction to the first drop says nothing about the fifth. The first is a startle; after that it fades and the question comes whether it can be “a little warmer”. That is the moment to widen the distance instead of the temperature, and that is what people who try it at home almost never do.

And my own old mistake: letting wax run onto the same spot because the picture was becoming pretty. The skin there did not need the new drops to stay warm. It already was.

What you can do yourself

• Test every warm object on the inside of your own wrist, not on your palm: that is less sensitive than the back of the hand where it will land in a moment.
• Extend the time instead of the temperature if it is not enough, because the damage runs exponentially with the temperature and only linearly with the time.
• Let nothing lie still, warm nor cold. Almost every documented injury in this corner is about something that stayed in place.
• Judge the skin with your eyes and not only with a question. Between the first pain and a burn there is only one degree.
• Agree on what does not happen. Fire is a different practice from wax; set those two apart beforehand.

More reading on temperature play

Within this glossary the warm side is at candle wax, with the melting points per wax type, and the cold side at ice cubes. Fireplay describes the sharpest form and peppermint oil the strangest: cold that the thermometer does not measure.

Beyond that, it pays to open the review in Burns itself, if only to see how many standards and leaflets run a wrongly copied version of the same limit.

Where this fits on this site

Heat and cold are on my list of possibilities, fire is not. What an evening looks like where this is one of the stimuli, and how we settle beforehand what is and is not used, you can read at the BDSM date.

Sources

• A review of the evidence for threshold of burn injury. Nicholas A. Martin & Sian Falder, Burns 43(8), 1624–1639, 2017 (DOI 10.1016/j.burns.2017.04.003). This series uses this article on three pages; /en/term/candle-wax takes the threshold per wax type from it and /en/term/fireplay what a flame does with it. Taken here is only what those two leave aside: the warning the article was written for, namely that the 1947 work of Moritz and Henriques was misread for years and that misleading versions of the time-temperature rule ended up in industrial standards, in burn-injury education, and in medical-legal advice. Plus the distinction that the time-temperature relationship is well founded for superficial burns in adult skin, but for deep burns and for children’s skin it is extrapolated and must be used with care.
• Modeling Skin Injury from Hot Rice Porridge Spills. Torgrim Log, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 15(4), 808, 2018 (DOI 10.3390/ijerph15040808; PMID 29677134; open access, full text read; first name checked against Crossref, because Europe PMC gives only “Log T.”). Mathematical modeling of skin injury based on the same experiments of Henriques and Moritz. Provides the finding that the injury develops linearly with time and exponentially with the absolute temperature, and the threshold temperature of 43.0 °C in the basal layer above which the damage begins to mount. Note: this study names a pain threshold of 44.8 °C at 0.1 mm depth and so places it above the damage threshold, while Martin and Falder place the pain just below it. Those two cannot be reconciled; this page follows Martin and Falder, because that is a review looking specifically at this limit.
• The Thermal Grill Illusion: Unmasking the Burn of Cold Pain. A. D. Craig & M. C. Bushnell, Science 265(5169), 252–255, 8 July 1994 (DOI 10.1126/science.8023144; PMID 8023144; authors, volume, issue, and pagination checked against Crossref). The article itself sits behind a paywall; what is used is what stands literally in the abstract. Provides the dating of Thunberg’s grill illusion to 1896, the description that alternating warm and cool bars against the skin produce “a sensation of strong, often painful heat”, the measurements on two classes of ascending spinothalamic neurons that respond differently to the grill, and the model of central disinhibition that predicted a fixed ratio between grill pain and cold pain, which was confirmed psychophysically.
• Temperature play. Wikipedia. Provides the definition of temperature play as stimulating the heat and cold receptors with objects and substances for the feeling, the list of water, melted wax, and ice, the use of a blindfold to heighten the sensations, the recommendation to use massage candles over ordinary candles, and the division into fireplay, ice play, and exposure to heat or cold. The entry has carried a warning since May 2011 that it rests on original research; the sentence citing a 2022 systematic review for a higher tolerance for heat pain is therefore not taken over here. See the source below.
• The Biology of BDSM: A Systematic Review. Elise Wuyts & Manuel Morrens, The Journal of Sexual Medicine 19(1), 144–157, 2022 (DOI 10.1016/j.jsxm.2021.11.002). Used here only to establish what it does not say: the abstract reports that pain thresholds turn out to be higher in submissive participants and that a BDSM interaction can raise them further, without anything about heat in particular. The full text sits behind a paywall, so the heat-specific reading cannot be verified.

Related terms

Temperature play is the branch of sensation play in which the stimulus is a difference in temperature.

• Candle wax. The warm version, with the melting point per wax type that decides whether it can be done.
• Ice cubes. The cold version, and what happens when cold stays in place.
• Fireplay. The version that counts as edgeplay, with flame instead of wax.
• Peppermint oil. Cold that exists only in the nerve and not in the thermometer.
• Blindfold. The object that, according to the encyclopedia, comes standard with this practice, and why.