Does anyone ever get a chemical taste or slightly numb tongue from making soap? I don't even make very much soap, only maybe 5 batches in the past 2 months, but for a few weeks now I've had that weird taste on my tongue. Not all the time, in fact at first I was thinking it was from breathing/tasting lawn chemicals when I was walking dogs in certain neighborhoods. I made two batches of soap in the last three days and today the taste/numbness is pretty strong. I usually mix my lye outside but still got some fumes last night, and yesterday I also zap tested a new soap with my tongue. Also since I was able to turn the furnace off, my curing room is now open to the rest of the house so I can smell the fragrances a lot too.
I wanted to respond to this a few days ago, but hadn't joined the forum yet. Well, now I joined, so here goes:
Yes, and my first thought was how much zap-testing have you been doing? I noticed that when I zap test, I do have an altered sense of taste for a while. Of course, 'a while' is relative. For me it has lasted as long as a couple of weeks, maybe longer but that was when I was doing a lot of zap testing.
Also, it just so happens that the sense of taste is affected by alterations to the sense of smell, so it certainly makes sense that the fumes from any scent might affect your sense of taste. Be it lye solution fumes, or fragrance oil fumes, or whatever.
People previously mentioned dietary factors as well as other things that are ingested as having affect on the sense of taste, and boy is that the truth! Many years ago, I took St. John's Wort tablets for a period of time and it altered my sense of smell remarkably, and it affected my sense of taste as well. Don't know which came first the taste or the smell, but it was incredibly distracting to me.
You and others have also mentioned migraine factors and that's another one to watch closely with soapmaking, I guess. I have had ocular migraines, but not so much lately. At first it was really alarming, but after I was diagnosed and knew what it was, it was actually kind of fun some of the time, like seeing a psychedelic show in my eyes, and not so bad unless I wanted to read a book or otherwise visually focus, then it wasn't so fun. So far no ocular migraines with soaping. It doesn't seem to trigger them for me.
BTW, in all my zap testing I never actually got zapped until last week (another story), so I'm thinking the altered sense of taste wasn't from the lye, it was from the saponified soap itself. And maybe some essential oils, although I didn't used to use much of those until recently, so I don't even think they were a factor when I first noticed this happening, but I could be wrong. Colorants, maybe, but not so much as I didn't used to use them much at all either.
