Think You Can Handle The Heat Of The One Chip Challenge?

In recent years, social media has brought us some memorable challenge videos like the Cinnamon Challenge, Mannequin Challenge, and the Ice Bucket Challenge. The latter was even used to raise awareness of ALS, with thousands of people joining in. However, the new social media challenge taking the world by storm (and spice) is the One Chip Challenge. This particular challenge consists of the participant eating one single chip, which is packaged in a small container. Sound easy? Wrong.

This chip, made by Paqui, is created using the Carolina Reaper pepper, which is currently the hottest recorded pepper on the planet. You think an habanero is spicy? The Carolina Reaper makes it look like candy. Just to give you an idea of the level of heat this pepper packs, we’ll refer to the Scoville scale, which measures the amount of heat, or spiciness, of something. The habanero packs a respectable 150,000 scoville units on the scale. The Carolina Reaper, however, turns the heat up exponentially, coming in at 1,500,000 scoville units. The best part is that this was the level of heat for LAST years chip. The current Chip Challenge chip is made with a batch of Carolina Reapers that break the scales at 1.9 million scoville units.

If you’re thinking why would actually willingly do this, well, the answer to that is plenty. Social media has blown up with participants braving the literal melting temperatures of this single chip. Participants typically start the challenge off with an air of confidence surrounding them. This quickly dissipates as the spice begins to kick in, and their world seemingly turns red. Milk, the usual saving grace from overwhelming spiciness seems to do little to ease the inherent suffering of the people who willingly take on the One Chip Challenge.

So which videos seem to best showcase the intensity of this challenge? Well, former NBA superstar and sports newscaster Shaquille O’Neil recently braved the challenge. Unfortunately, it didn’t end so well for him, as seen in this video of him on air.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQeXUdXn6c

Things ended even worse for Denver news anchor Natalie Tysdal, who ended up getting sick on air, requiring to be helped off set. After things cooled down, she took to her Facebook to let everyone know she was okay, but made it clear she did not recommend doing the One Chip Challenge. She states, “I thought I was okay until I had a drink of my coffee to wash down the chip. I threw up, couldn’t breathe and felt like fire was coming out of my mouth, nose and ears. I had a bottle of water, a glass of milk, a tablespoon of honey and 3 mints and still felt on fire. An hour later I had chills and a massive headache. Three hours have gone by and I feel like I was beat up in a dark alley”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6wEGB-JiWw

If I haven’t scared you off yet, and you still think you’re interested in testing your limits with this challenge, you might be out of luck. Currently, the chip is sold out on Paqui’s website. You can still find single-serving chip boxes being sold by third-party sellers for a some fairly absurd prices. Either way, you can still find a plethora of videos on YouTube showcasing the searing difficulty of this challenge.