Introducing the Hair Straightener Tongue Challenge…I think….

Hard to explain what makes anyone willingly put themselves through extreme pain for clout (this guy who shocked his dick off by thumbing it into an electrical socket, for instance), and yet here we are with a new trend tentatively named the Hair Straightener Tongue Challenge.

Like the other 18 million people who have seen this video by now, you've probably watched and rewatched this clip of a girl clamping 400 degree ceramic irons onto her tongue, and then freaking out because she clamped 400 degree ceramic irons onto her tongue:

There are hints – just whispers at this point – that this might be part of a wider Hair Straightener Challenge (self-explanatory). Check these out:

Bogus viral challenges, the kind featured on Fox News as "you won't believe what devil-worshipping teens is into this time," come and go, as anyone who hasn't done the Tide Pod and Snort A Condom challenges will tell you (there's also the Momo Challenge, a thoroughly fake game so poorly conceived that the only aim of it to be just "fucking die").

So a few tweets from locals saying the Hair Straightener Challenge exists aren't enough to say it's definitely real. And yet. There are a lot of videos of girls doing it:

"Did you really think I was gonna flat iron my tongue? Well, you were right."

And here's a whole compilation of them:

So does this mean there's an underground, non-hashtagged, genuine subculture of tongue-burning teens out there, who get high on scalding themselves? Yeah, I guess?

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@hshukman