It never fails that whenever I chop up jalapenos, even though I wash my hands, I still end up with a burning face because I somehow didn’t get all the jalapeno stuff off my hands.
Every.Single.Time.
Jalapenos and other chili peppers contain capsaicin which is an irritant that causes a burning sensation on the skin. This is why it is wisely advised that you do not rub your eyes or touch your face after handling chili peppers.
The generic tip is to wash your hands. Makes sense, wash your hands thoroughly to get rid of the capsaicin and thus removing the irritant and any risk of causing inadvertent pain to your face.
However using regular handsoap doesn’t seem to work, even when I wash my hands multiple times.
So I got to thinking, short of starting to wear gloves, how could I correct this problem? Clearly regular soap wasn’t working, so what could I use instead?
The next time I found myself chopping and seeding some jalapenos, instead of reaching for the handsoap, I washed my hands with dishsoap instead.
And it worked!
I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before! If you think about it, dishsoap is meant to remove food stuffs from plates, pots, and various kitchen accessories.
Why not hands?
I’ve used dishsoap before to help remove greasy and sticky things from my hands like oils, butter, and other things like peanut butter, and juices from meat.
It also cuts right through the jalapeno hot stuff and will get that off your hands.
Hooray! Now I don’t have to deal with a burning face any longer.
Next time you’re chopping chili peppers or if you are working with something a little greasy and messy, reach for the dishsoap to wash your hands with instead of regular soap!
Ahh, thank you for this! I have the same problem – cut jalapenos, wash hands like four times, still burn the heck out of my eyes when taking my contacts out later. Hopefully this will help.
In high school, I was in a play where we ran out of gray hair spray right before the curtain went up… and so I had to use gray shoe polish. Of course, shampoo would not get the stuff out no matter how hard I tried.
I called my sister (who had gone through beauty school some years ago) and she knew the answer — dish soap. Hair, like skin, is porous, and so the shoe polish filled in those pores. Dish soap, which is made to get grime out of pores on dishes, was the obvious (to my sister) antidote.
I’ve always used dish soap to wash my hands in the kitchen. I have an Ecolab antibacterial foam dispenser that I use for scrubbing up my cutting boards, but a seperate container of hand soap takes up counter space I can’t afford to give up.
For that matter, since I was given a Pampered Chef soap foamer (or whatever they call them) last Christmas I’ve taken to using dish washing soap in the bathroom. They’re not generally antibacterial, but I’m one of those people who think that the indiscriminate use of antibacterial agents when simple Dove or Dial soap is potentially doing people more harm than good in the long term.