A 7-year-old girl was recently hospitalized — and put into an induced coma — for severe burns after microwaving a popular squishy toy called NeeDoh.
In March, Scarlett Selby from Festus, Missouri, was playing with a NeeDoh cube after leaving it in the freezer all night.
“The next day she showed me it was rock solid and [she] was playing with it,” Scarlett’s father, Josh Selby, told Kennedy News, 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.”
Evidently, Scarlett had been replicating what she watched in videos online in an attempt to make the cube more flexible. The cube, however, erupted, and the hot, sticky substance inside covered her face and chest.
“It all happened so quickly,” Selby recalled. “I heard her scream, and it was like a blood-curdling scream.”
Selby and Scarlett’s mom, Amanda Blankenship, rushed the 7-year-old, who was “screaming in pain” to St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“It was terrible how scared she was and how much that hurt her,” Scarlett’s mother shared.
For three days, Scarlett was in a medically induced coma because doctors worried that burns around her mouth could swell and block her airway. She was also on a feeding tube for seven days because of the extent of the burns on her lips.
Today, Scarlett is healing. But physical and emotional scars remain.
“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,” Blankenship told Kennedy News. “I tell her she doesn’t need to be embarrassed about it. She went through a lot and it was a terrible, terrible accident.”
Scarlett might need skin grafts years in the future, depending on whether the scar stretches out and grows.
Schylling, the manufacturer of NeeDoh, said in a statement to People: “Ensuring the safety of our consumers is fundamental for Schylling. We were disappointed to see there had been a trend on social media demonstrating product misuse of our NeeDoh brand. Misusing a NeeDoh product by microwaving, heating, or freezing is dangerous and may cause injury.”
Additionally, Schylling says it has partnered with social media platforms like TikTok to take down content showing misuse of NeeDoh. A product warning was also added to the packaging and its website.
Earlier in 2025, a little girl named Gia was similarly burned after microwaving NeeDoh, Inside Edition reported.
