The Dreaded Onion Hands

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gracifer

Assistant Cook
Joined
Apr 25, 2013
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Hello all :) I am new here and I need some help! I apologize in advance, this is going to be kind of long ;/
Tuesday morning (4/23), I woke up and noticed that every time my hands got anywhere near my face, I would smell something rancid. I almost gagged. I pinpointed the stench to just the palms of my hands and tried to figure out what was wrong with my disgusting hands. My first thought: "Aha, I diced a huge white onion last night for chicken casserole without wearing gloves." It was a very STRONG onion, might I add.
So I go online and read everyone's little tips and tricks for removing the smell left behind from cooking with onions. I tried hand soap/dishwashing liquid, rubbing my hands on stainless steel several times, baking soda, salt, peroxide, vinegar, vanilla, coffee beans, lemon juice, and grapefruit-peppermint scented exfoliate foot scrub. The coffee beans/grapefruit-peppermint scented foot scrub seemed to mask the smell very well but didn't eliminate it and was almost as overbearing as the oniony scent.
After all of that scrubbing and submerging and cleaning, the smell lingered. I started to think that maybe it wasn't the onion but that it was a mild fungal infection on my hands. I figured it could have been caused by the fact that I keep eczema on my hands and the day that I cooked chicken casserole, my hands were in water a lot...(open sores+moisture=fungus growth?)
So later on in the day on Tuesday, I started treating my hands with medicated fungal cream.
Now it's Thursday (4/25) and my hands don't seem much better. I'm still smelly. I figured that if this was a fungal infection, it would have been noticeably better by now considering it would have been a very mild infection.
So now I'm thinking that it MIGHT actually be the onion because I kind of get the impression that it can linger that long from all of my internet searching.
Is there ANY WAY that the smell of onion can last for 4-5 days? My hands touched the onions Monday night and it's Thursday night now and I'm getting annoyed! It's gross and I have been living under the assumption that I had a sick fungal infection on my hands and now I'm not quite sure. So what do you all think? Fungal or onion?
Any stories/advice/wisdom would be great.
Thanks so much if you read all of that :)
 
rub your hands with raw garlic and the onion problem will go away. :cool:

and welcome, grac.

but seriously, dip your hands in bleach for a second or two.

the reason bleach feels greasy is that it's dissolving your skin. it also kills a lot of stuff. then rinse and see if that helps.

your hands should smell like bleach.

or if you were cooking with yellow onions, they should smell like white onions, or vidalias with scented bleach.. he hee.
 
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LORD! I posted about this on Facebook and a friend reminded me of the stainless steel thing. And I thought "this won't work, it didn't work last time." But I gave it another try really got in there this time--between the fingers and everything. And the smell is GONE! Wow!!!! I will never forget this tip!!

Thank you, Buckytom, for your response! :P glad I didn't have to resort to bleach.. but if I would have read this before trying to stainless steel thing again, I definitely would have. I was miserable!
 
Fungal infection. There's a couple of words you don't read on a cooking forum often :ermm:
It seems if you are preparing foods with open sores on your hands that it would be second nature to wear gloves, but you didn't and me pointing that out isn't going to help you. I'm going to say it, the smell, will *probably* eventually wear off. Sometimes I can smell myself sweating out a previous night's onion that I ate when I'm taking a shower the following morning. So maybe the onion isn't just on your palms. Maybe the onion you ate is in your system and lasting a long time.
 
Fungal infection. There's a couple of words you don't read on a cooking forum often :ermm:
It seems if you are preparing foods with open sores on your hands that it would be second nature to wear gloves, but you didn't and me pointing that out isn't going to help you. I'm going to say it, the smell, will *probably* eventually wear off. Sometimes I can smell myself sweating out a previous night's onion that I ate when I'm taking a shower the following morning. So maybe the onion isn't just on your palms. Maybe the onion you ate is in your system and lasting a long time.

Well, my hands weren't, like, bloody/cut up/gruesome like I probably had you imagining.. (probably shouldn't have said sores, lol.) It's just that the backs of my hands were kind of chapped and dry from eczema (I might also add that I wash my hands obsessively, which contributes to the drying and chapping.) And like I said, back of my hands, so no contact with food but directly with water during hand/dish washing. I always wear gloves (which is why I had no idea onions would do this, I guess) but didn't that night because I was broke at the time and ran out of my disposable gloves. Anyway, assuming fungal infection seemed far-fetched to me, too, but I figured it was just about the only other reason my hands would stink for so long. As it turns out, it was just the onions after all, because the smell is gone as of now after I tried the stainless steel method a second time :) I'm just a silly girl in the middle of ...now here :cool: :alien:
 
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