US woman with longest tongue in world loves seeing people scream in disbelief

Chanel Tapper, with her 3.8-inch (9.75 cm) tongue—longer than a medium-sized lightbulb— holds the Guinness World Record for having the longest tongue, and what she loves most is watching people shriek in disbelief.
Tapper, a California native, holds the title for woman with the globe’s longest tongue and can skillfully use it to remove Jenga blocks from a stack, take out a lemon from a glass of water, flip plastic cups with it, raise a spoon by curling it around the item, and touch both the tip of her nose and under her chin.

But what thrills her most is showing her tongue to people and watching them shriek in disbelief and shock.
“Honestly, the best reaction I could ever get when someone sees my tongue is screaming,” Tapper, 34, said recently in an interview published on the Guinness World Records website.
“People yell or scream in shock, or horror sometimes, [and] that’s probably my favourite because it’s funny to me because it’s a dramatic response.”

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Tapper once recalled how she got into the habit of teasing people around her when she was about 11 by sticking out her tongue and getting that reaction on their faces and comments on its length. A couple of years later, she became a viral sensation after YouTube users spotted her sticking her tongue out on a video.

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Guinness World Records finally invited her to an event in Los Angeles in 2010 to measure her tongue and see if she merited a spot in the database. She beat two other competitors for the record, surpassing the average tongue length for women by about 1.9 cm (roughly three-fourths of an inch) – and for men by some 1.2 cm (a half-inch or so).

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More than one online user has compared her to Venom, the slimy-tongued, fictional Marvel Comics villain, she said.
“I like little fun, silly things like that,” Tapper said.

And what’s more, the recognition had given her the chance to travel internationally.
One such trip involved visiting the fashion capital Milan and being photographed with her tongue painted blue and green in photos for the Welcome Successful Living campaign from the Italian brand, Diesel.
“It’s fun—I get to see the parts of the world I’ve never seen before,” the Guinness record holder said.

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