What to do if your hands get burned while picking chili peppers

Many families in our rural areas have vegetable gardens with a variety of rich vegetables. One vegetable that everyone grows commonly is pepper. Although some families do not eat peppers, cutting one or two when cooking can make the dish taste better, especially some freshly picked peppers are more delicious. But sometimes picking peppers will make your hands spicy. What should you do at this time?

After cutting the peppers, my hands felt like they were burned by fire and were burning hot. At this time, some people will rinse with cold water, but this can only slightly relieve the pain and cannot completely solve the problem. In fact, you can remove the spiciness by applying alcohol, vinegar, washing your hands with hot water, etc.

The substance that produces the spicy taste in chili peppers is a type of capsaicin, which is collectively called capsaicin. When cutting peppers, capsaicin sticks to the skin, causing the capillaries to dilate, resulting in redness and heat of the skin, and accelerating the local metabolic rate. At the same time, it will stimulate the pain nerves, which is why we usually feel burning hands. It is generally believed that this is caused by capsaicin causing chemical changes in the nerve endings of the skin.

Capsaicin is soluble in ethanol and alkaline aqueous solutions, but insoluble in cold water. In industry, capsaicin is extracted from chili peppers using edible alcohol as an extractant. Therefore, based on this principle, in life, you can apply alcohol to dissolve the capsaicin on your hands. After cutting peppers, you can wipe your hands in one direction with an alcohol cotton ball, then wash your hands with clean water, and then dry them. Do this three times until the symptoms are relieved.

In addition, you can also wash your hands with a small amount of vinegar. This is because vinegar is acidic and can neutralize capsaicin. If there is no medical alcohol or vinegar, washing your hands with hot water is also a good idea, because capsaicin will produce irritating evaporation under high temperature. Although it is not as effective as alcohol and vinegar, it is worse than cold water.

In fact, when cutting peppers, you can press the peppers with the pads of your fingers instead of pinching them with your fingernails, so that your hands are not easily burned.