When both Michael Phelps and Gwyneth Paltrow get behind a health trend, you know it's going to be big. So it was with cupping, a treatment used in traditional Chinese medicine that uses suction cups to promote the flow of blood and lymph fluid — and often leaves bruises in the process. One man's photos of his particularly bad bruises are unlike anything we've ever seen.
This week, U.K.-based man Peter Weston shared a photo on Facebook of huge purple bruises left on his back after a massage therapist talked him into a cupping session, the Daily Mail reports. "F*ck me never again. I'll never get it done again I was in that much pain," he wrote.
At this point, cupping bruises aren't so shocking. They've even been seen on the red carpet. But while red or slightly purple bruises might seem normal, Weston's deep violet marks certainly seem like cause for alarm.
According to Mila Mintsis, a licensed acupuncturist at Dynamic Sports Physical Therapy in New York, this kind of bruising is actually nothing to be concerned about. "The marks look pretty normal," she tells Allure. As for the super dark color, that type of mark "usually occurs with fire cupping — the traditional way of doing it," she says.
When doing fire cupping, a trained therapist swabs a plastic or glass cup with alcohol and then lights it on fire, creating a vacuum inside the cup that suctions it to the skin. The less intense technique is to manually create the suction using a little plastic device, as we've previously reported. "What Michael Phelps had done and made famous was a more modern way of doing it," Mintsis says, one that left less severe-looking marks.
How dark the marks are can also depend on how easily you typically bruise. Most cupping bruises will stay dark for a couple of days but could last a whole week. Either way, it's not something to freak out about. And while there's not a huge amount of evidence supporting the benefits of cupping, it's also believed to be pretty safe — so if this form of therapy makes you feel better, some bruising doesn't need to keep you away. If you find cupping painful like Weston did, though, there also isn't a good reason to put yourself through it.
