Sunday, April 25, 2010

How to Get Rid of Onion Smell

THE GREAT ONION ODOR EXPERIMENT

This evening I made Pioneer Woman's delicious onion strings for a small army, a.k.a. my family, and my hands STINK. Actually, all of me smells oniony; my hair, my shirt, even, and this may be too much information, my bra. I reek of onions, people! For the greater good of all mankind and so my husband will allow me to crawl into bed with him tonight, I am sacrificing the well being of the skin on my hands to determine if any of the make-onion-odor-disappear legends I discovered on Google actually work.

The experiment begins...

First, I tried regular old soap and water. Even though I've washed my hands numerous times since I sliced onions earlier, I'm still very oniony. Soap and water has seemingly no effect on this smell.

One of the tips here is to try toothpaste. Hmm... I squeezed some toothpaste from my handy dandy tube of Colgate on my hands and rubbed it around for a minute or so. They still smelled like an onion. A minty onion, but an onion.

Several sites, including this one said to try rubbing my hands on a stainless steel sink for awhile. That had absolutely no effect except making me feel stupid for rubbing my hands all over the sink for no apparent reason. My hands still smelled of minty onions.

After the stainless steel failure, I tried vinegar. I think I was supposed to wash my hands in vinegar for longer than the 15 seconds I did, but the stench of vinegar was more repulsive than the onion smell, so I rinsed it off. I'd rather smell like a toothpaste covered onion than a jug of vinegar. Ick.

Next, I tried lemon juice. Technically, I should have kept my hands in the lemon juice for three minutes or so, but I have never claimed to be a patient person. Plus, I have a little cut on my hand that kept stinging, so I probably didn't give lemon juice a fair chance either. After I rinsed the lemon juice off my hands, I really thought it worked though. My hands were lemony fresh instead oniony. After I dried my hands though and sniffed them again, the onion odor had returned only not as strong.

I headed back to the bathroom and tried mouthwash this time. It felt nice and cool, but I didn't really notice a change in the smell.

My skin was starting to feel a bit abused, so I decided to try my Mary Kay Satin Hands peach smooth hand scrub next. I rubbed the exfoliating scrub on my hands, enjoyed the peachy aroma, rinsed my hands, gave them a sniff, and guess what! No onion. After a few minutes, the onion smell was still gone from my hands, so the experiment was over. I didn't get to try tomato juice, peanut butter, or a salt scrub, but that's okay. There will be other onions.

AND THE WINNER IS....Mary Kay Satin Hands peach smoothie hand scrub. Or a combination of all the things I tried. I'm not really sure actually; I'm not sure my experiment was all that scientific. All I know is that my hands no longer smell like onions. But my bra still does.

1 comment:

Ginny Marie said...

I've heard stainless steel is supposed to work, too, but I've never tried it! (I don't have a stainless steel sink!)

The Mary Kay hand scrub definitely sounds like the way to go! :)