Carolina Reaper Purple

Carolina Reaper Purple is a superhot Reaper-type Capsicum chinense sold as a purple-fruiting variant with the wrinkled, tailed pod shape commonly associated with Carolina Reaper-style lines. Live seller descriptions consistently present it as an extremely hot pepper with pods that pass through a purple stage before finishing red. Pod size is usually described around 4.0–7.5 cm long and about 2.5–4.0 cm wide, while plant height is commonly listed around 76.0–91.5 cm, with some sellers stretching that to about 120 cm.

The history behind the name is inconsistent in the seed trade. One current seller lists it as a USA-origin line attributed to Ed Currie, another says it was created in Brazil by Carlos Jr. Lolo, and an Italian source describes it as coming from a Carolina Reaper × Naga Purple cross. Those claims do not line up cleanly, so the safest reading is that “Carolina Reaper Purple” is being used in the seed trade for a purple Reaper-type hybrid line, but not every seller is describing the same backstory. Brazil is used here because the strongest exact-name source for this purple variant gives Brazil specifically.

Colour descriptions also vary a bit between sources. Some sellers say the pods go from purple to red, others describe green to purple to red, and one source phrases the sequence oddly enough that it likely reflects seller wording drift rather than a genuinely different ripening pattern. The strongest overall pattern across the live sources is green to purple to red, with the purple stage being the defining feature of this line.

Heat reporting ranges from about 1,500,000 to 2,200,000 SHU depending on seller, with one exact-name listing giving 2,000,000 SHU flat. The single-number value of 2,000,000 SHU fits comfortably inside that published range. Several sellers also openly describe the line as unstable or semi-stable, noting that it can throw different pod colours and shapes, which matches the broader picture of a modern specialty superhot hybrid circulating in collector and rare-seed grower circles rather than a long-established fixed cultivar.