A father watched in horror as the bubbling goo from a squishy toy burned through the clothes of his 7-year-old daughter and ripped the skin from her tiny body after a TikTok challenge went tragically wrong.
What started as an innocent experiment turned into a horrific accident for seven-year-old Missouri’s Scarlett Selby, who like many children her age, loved playing with her NeeDoh squishy toy.
The little girl, from a suburb of St. Louis, decided to level up her toy after seeing videos on TikTok of people freezing and microwaving the toy to make it more malleable.
The squishy stress cubes, made by Schylling Toys, comes with a warning that reads, “Do NOT heat, freeze, or microwave, may cause personal injury.”
Despite the warnings, social media users were pushing the limits of the product, sharing clips of them biting, freezing or microwaving the jelly toys that are made of rubber with a polyvinyl alcohol filling.
Explosive
Determined to make her toy a bit more fun, Scarlett placed her squishy in the freezer overnight and then microwaved it for a few seconds the next day.
“She’d frozen the NeeDoh cube the night before, and the next day she showed me it was rock solid and was playing with it,” her 44-year-old father Josh Selby said, per the New York Post. “She stuck it in the microwave. I was watching her and saw her touch it to check it wasn’t too hot when she pulled it out.”
But, as she removed it, the seemingly harmless experiment went tragically wrong.
‘Blood-curling scream’
“It all happened so quickly,” Selby said, re-living the horrifying moment where the NeeDoh toy exploded and bathed the tot in burning goo, that’s been compared to a “napalm-like substance.”
“I heard her scream, and it was like a blood-curdling scream. It had exploded all over her chest, mouth and chin,” Selby said, adding that after hearing the painful cries from his daughter, he rushed over and tried to brush the bubbling goo off her body and clothes.
But the substance was “thick and sticky,” making it difficult for him to remove from Scarlett.
“Whenever I touched her, my hand stuck to her. It was really thick and sticky. I ripped her shirt off of her because it was stuck to her shirt as well,” the father said of the incident that happened about five months ago.
“I was a complete mess. She spent a week in the hospital and for three days of that she was in the coma. I don’t think I could speak to anybody without crying the entire time,” he added.
‘Still screaming’
Selby and Scarlet’s mom, Amanda Blakenship, rushed their daughter to hospital.
“She was in so much pain. She was still screaming when we got to the hospital and it’s a good 30-minute drive from where we live. It was terrible how scared she was and how much that hurt her,” the 35-year-old mom said, according to the Daily Mail.
Once the family arrived at St Louis Children’s Hospital, Scarlett was placed in an induced coma for three days while doctors worked tirelessly to stabilize her condition. She also had a feeding tube installed due to her lips being so badly burned.
After a week in the hospital, she was finally discharged, but her struggles were far from over.
‘Self conscious’
While little Scarlett was being treated for her injuries, doctors decided against giving the girl a skin graft but her mother fears it may still be necessary as her scarring is “so bad.”
And the “profound scars,” Blankenship said, go beyond just the physical.
She often finds Scarlett staring at herself in the mirror after a bath, tears streaming down her face – an emotional reminder of the trauma she’s endured.
“She gets very self-conscious, and I’ll see her trying to cover her scar up with her shirt when we’re out in public sometimes, or she’ll come home from school and say another kid asked her about it,” Blakenship said. “I tell her she doesn’t need to be embarrassed about it. She went through a lot, and it was a terrible, terrible accident.”
Father’s warning
Since the accident, Scarlett’s dad has been warning other parents to toss the toys.
He said: ‘I would have never thought of something exploding outside of the microwave like that…For that to happen to my daughter was the hardest thing that I’ve gone through.”
Selby adds, “I’ve told absolutely everyone to throw them out if they have them. The product that’s in it is like glue, so you essentially have hot glue exploding on you. Once it touches you, there’s no way to get it off.”
Clips of the NeeDoh microwave challenge has since been removed from TikTok that claims on its site to prohibit the “display or promotion of dangerous activities and challenges or violence. This may include dares, games, tricks, inappropriate use of dangerous tools, eating substances that are harmful to one’s health, or similar activities that may lead to significant physical harm.”
What do you think of what happened to this beautiful little girl? Please share this story with others so they too can be warned of the dangers of heating squishy toys.
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