Today, I got some scotch bonnet chillis from the supermarket. (Closely related to Habaneros, if anyone’s unfamiliar.) I’d never noticed before, but the advice on the packaging includes:
Now, I’ve dealt with these things quite happily plenty of times. I certainly make sure I clean my hands thoroughly after chopping them, and have never had any trouble. Does anyone ever actually bother putting gloves on just to chop up a chilli?
If I think of it, yes. One inadvertant touch to the eye cures inattention for awhile, of course.
I think we may have had this discussion before, but… there are worse places than the eye to carelessly touch with pepper-juiced hands, as I discovered.
I discovered that, too. By proxy 
. That’s why I’m fastidious about washing them!
I suspect even washing may not take care of all of it - you may get some under your nail bed, for instance. I’d be safe and use gloves were I you, but then again I use them for even milder versions of chiles.
I wuss out - rather than use gloves, I use a fork and knife to manipulate any hot peppers I’m preparing.
I have ever worn gloves when chopping peppers. It’s easier to wear gloves than to wash my hands extra extra extra extra well before touching anything. Takes more than one lather rinse to make your hands safe.
Man do I have painful memories. I just made the mistake of wiping my brow. My forehead started to burn so I went to wash it off, but that just spread it further and into my eyes. 20 minutes of shear agony. I wear gloves now.
How do you finely chop them? To be honest, I’d be more worried about slipping with the utensils and doing myself an injury than anything the chilli itself could throw at me!
Re. getting them under nails - I suppose I do have freakishly-short nails, as is necessary to demonstrate to pupils just how short they can be. That’s a different thread entirely.
To add a few things here, I’ll say that for some reason it’s difficult to simply wash such things off. I’m a smoker, and one problem a smoker can have is wearing contacts. Every time I go out, when I come home, I have to scrub my fingertips with stringent dish-washing detergent in order to get my fingertips completely oil-free. I think that the pepper juices/and whatever it is in cigarette smoke that burns your eyes, gets into the oil on your fingers. I think that when you use normal hand soap it isn’t designed to strip them of all the oils, so you still have some residue. For some reason, a shower does the trick too. I think it’s because the washing of the hair, plus the prolonged period of hot water + soap gets rid of most of it.
But let me tell you, I’ve never came closer to clawing my eyes out than the few times I’ve inserted a contact lens with contaminated hands. To put a contact in (I try to leave them facing cup-upwards at night) you need to put your index finger in the cup, which will then make it stick to the finger. Then you pull it out and pinch it with your other hand. Finally you take your dominant index finger and put it underneath to stick it in the eye. Well, that time that it sits face-down on the index finger can be enough. All of the stuff that was on your finger gets plastered against your eye once you stick it in, and there’s no way you can get it out of your eye fast enough…Then you sit around crying for 10 minutes.
Trust me. There are worse places than the eyes.
Very sensitive skin. Very.
Like I said earlier… (I was not alone, if anyone else is still puzzled)
I got scotch bonnet juice in my eye - the worst part is trying to continue cooking with your eye blurry from streaming tears… it hurts a good long while. The last time I didn’t wear gloves, but I minimized the contact, and washed up extremely well.
DEAR GOD, I hope you have stopped before handling those things w/out gloves! Actually, I thought Scotch Bonnets were habanero’s, equally, not ‘closely related’…either way, the highest on the Scoville scale there is…ouch, I think I am twitching recalled my last experience thinking “aw, no worries, mon…why would I want to find and buy plastic gloves to wear…I’m pretty resilient”…
Flashback to around mid-80’s, and I was making my live-in SO at the time, a nice batch of homemade lasagna. I’d bought several of those little red italian peppers - cherry peppers? - at a local farmer’s market, as his b-day was at the beginning of Oct. So…I’m futzing around my apt, starting on the sauce, and started w/ the peppers, THEN went onto the onions…well, I had no initial response to the peppers, and then the onions made me start to tear, so don’t I go into the bathroom and splash my face w/ water…with the hands that had handled the peppers…honest ta god, I started screaming out loud, running around my very large apt at the time, and the pain was so bad, I couldn’t even see…not funny here…I mean panicking, and it took 20 min until I was finally able to open my eyes, and they were staring out at me from the bathroom mirror, swollen purple, and extremely painful. I managed to flush most of the toxin off myself, and get through the next few hours, BUT THEN, when I tried to go to sleep that night, realized that the heat had actually bled under the pads of my fingers, and went to sleep on a twin bed in the spare bedroom, w/ bowls of ice water on either side of the bed for my hands to rest in…then, as I slept, I’d roll out of one side, and wake up feeling the burn, then same thing for the other side. Honestly, one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had, stemming from “just not using rubber gloves”…NEVER AGAIN!!!
There was definitely a thread on SDMB fairly recently about painful experiences when penis had ensued after preparing peppers. Wear the gloves!
I know what you’re talking about, but I’m not convinced that your wiener is more sensitive than your eyeballs. I am also a contact lens wearer. You do have two eyeballs though, so maybe clawing one eyeball out is better than cutting off your schlong.
I’ve been using a lot of habaneros in my cooking recently.
I don’t use gloves, but I wash very thoroughly after each session. I’ve gotten pepper juices in my eyes, and sat there with one eye closed for 15 minutes, waiting for the sensation to die down. Owwwie. But, the thing that’s more likely to bother me, though is when I start sauteeing the peppers and the heat makes something to go airborne that makes me cough like a emphysmiac.
(Not that I’m going to stop cooking with them. Just have to get a gas mask.)
Nope, I chopped the things to a pulp, no problem at all. And they’re a cultivar of the Habanero, according to Wikipedia.
I’m being too subtle, still? Not my wiener…my girlfriend was the victim…
I select habaneros that have a stem, and hold them by the stem to handle them. When mincing the chunk that I’ve cut away from the seed pod, I use a big chef’s knife, and then use a little paring knife to scrape the bits off the blade of the bigger knife. Then the bits are swept up with the big knife and scraped into a small bowl and the cutting board and knifes instantly rinsed under cold running water. In this way I avoid ever touching the chile at all.
And aren’t habaneros good? I once subbed them into Rick Bayless’s jalapeno-and-tomato salsa and they were so tasty that I now use them exclusively in salsa recipes.
Remember, folks, use milk to flush the area.