Fierce competition at the NZ Chilli Eating Champs in Auckland had competitors sweating and in tears, on Thursday, as they struggled to eat the world's hottest chillies.
Aotearoa's hardcore chilli eaters went face to face with Australian World title holder, Greg 'Iron Guts' Barlow.
Competitors were challenged to try 17 different types of peppers starting with a pepper similar in heat to that of a jalapeno chilli and finishing with the Carolina Reaper, the world's hottest pepper, about 700 times hotter.
The chillies are measured in their heat by the Scoville Scale, a jalapeno is up to 6000 and the Carolina Reaper is more than two million. The Carolina is so hot you'd need to drink 500 litres of water to cool down.
"All senses just die, your mouth gets numb then the whole body just flows with it you start to sweat lava it just burns everything," said Barlow who was the last man standing, and winner of the event.
At the halfway mark only three of the ten competitors were remaining, with most of those that had dropped out vomiting.
Australian chilli expert Chilli Philli said it's at this stage where contestants can black out and begin hallucinating.
"There's nothing on earth like the pain and the heat and the intensity and it doesn't just go away in five minutes,".
He compared it to labour pains.
"I had a few ladies say that to me who had labour pains for 38 hours, saying this is worse, so it's a phenomenal scale."
New Zealand's chilli-eating champ Jesse Painter couldn't do another round and called it quits, coming second place.
"I'm about to throw up.. sorry New Zealand couldn't do it for us but [Greg Barlow's] is a beast.
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