Verified by 
Those old public service messages about the brain on drugs and the visual of the egg sunny side up in the frying pan came to mind when I saw a CDC report about eye injury hazards from “foam parties.” Fried eggs in various preparations lend themselves to eye metaphors in many cultures, which may account for my train of thought, albeit colored by the notion that it’s hard to overestimate what people can do to themselves.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), not surprisingly, felt compelled to explain to uninitiated readers of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report what a foam party actually is (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6233a5.htm): “At foam parties, soapy foam is sprayed onto the dance floor while participants dance. The foam is distributed by blowers on the ground or attached to the ceiling, and several feet of foam can accumulate. Foam parties can last for several hours while foam is dispersed intermittently throughout the night…Some formulations used at foam parties are proprietary, and chemicals, chemical compositions, and concentrations are unknown.”
The event that led to the CDC report was a foam party that happened one May night in a Naples, Florida club. It sent 56 people seeking medical care for eye irritation and injuries, the majority to emergency departments and urgent care clinics. This was only one in a long string of similar medical reports – one of the first that I could find was a 1996 letter out of Houston published in the New England Journal of Medicine documenting six cases of similar eye injuries.
By the way, the venue need not be a club. It can indeed be your own home. A nice how-to primer has been hosted by some enterprising MIT students provided you can access Joy© dishwashing soap, a clean garbage pail, a garden hose, and a site that can sustain water damage or, as they disclaim at MIT: “Following the instructions herein could easily destroy your house. You and you alone are responsible for any damage you cause. These instructions do not constitute a guarantee that if you follow them, your house, your health, your morals, or whatever will not be damaged or destroyed. Don't say we didn't warn you, and above all, don't bring a lawsuit against us. If you don't have the permission of the owner of the building, you shouldn't do this!” (http://www.mit.edu/people/ara/howto.html)
The origins of the foam party mini-industry are hard to a pin down with exactitude, perhaps understandably, but the Mediterranean Basin seems to be the cradle of this particular step forward in the inexorable progress of human civilization. In Ibiza they have a word for it – Epsuma. Indeed, the Espuma at Amnesia has been a thing for years, this past summer on Ibiza graced by none other than guest DJ Paris Hilton. Israel has been another foam party hot spot. A recent medical report in the journal Cornea by Dr. Abulafia and colleagues documents a series of eye injuries from what it refers to as artificial snow spray ("party foam"/"silly string") that occurred during two consecutive years of Israeli Independence Day celebrations. Involving just under a 100 patients treated at one medical center, all had irritation and one in four suffered more serious corneal abrasions. The good news was that there was a big fall off in cases (roughly 90%) over the two years studied. The authors of the report attributed this to a national media campaign on foam party hazards (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23132449). This is your eye; this is your eye bombarded with irritating soap foam; any questions?
