Humanity will never stop searching for a hotter pepper. The Carolina Reaper held the record for being the spiciest pepper on Earth from 2013 to May 2017, when it was unseated by the astonishingly spicy Dragon’s Breath pepper. The Dragon’s Breath did not have long to enjoy its victory, though, because it was just supplanted by an even hotter pepper, called Pepper X.

The heat of chili peppers is measured on the Scoville scale. A Jalapeño pepper clocks in at 10,000 to 20,000 Scoville units, but that’s actually pretty mild when compared with the world’s spiciest peppers. A Habanero pepper maxes out at 350,000 Scoville units. The Carolina Reaper took the Guinness World Record for the spiciest pepper in the world with 1.4 to 2.2 million Scovilles. The Dragon’s Breath is reportedly even hotter than that, because that one can get up to 2.4 million Scovilles. Before the Dragon’s Breath took the title, these were the 11 hottest chili peppers in the world.

Now, according to First We Feast, there’ a new world’s hottest pepper in town, and it’s called Pepper X.

Pepper X was created by Ed Currie, who created the recently dethroned Carolina Reaper. He says Pepper X clocks in at 3.18 million Scoville units, which would be positively excruciating to try to eat.


Eating extremely hot peppers can be risky. Last year a competitive eater tried to eat a burger laced with ghost peppers--which are rated at 1 million Scoville units--and wound up with a hole in his esophagus and a collapsed lung. A group of middle school kids in Indiana got their hands on some Carolina Reaper peppers, and their school had to call the paramedics after more than two dozen kids got pepper juice in their eyes and mouths. The Dragon’s Breath pepper is potentially deadly if eaten. It was actually created to improve the resistance of plants and possibly for its use as an anaesthetic.

Pepper X is not available for people to eat whole, but Currie teamed up with the First We Feast series “Hot Ones.” The first 1,000 bottles sold out in less than two minutes. It’s available from The Heatonist for $20 and would give a real kick to any of our best hot sauce recipes.