life, the universe, and donna

Tyler Durden: Now, ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed them at a certain spot in the river. You know why?
Narrator: No.
Tyler Durden: Human sacrifices were once made on the hills above this river. Bodies burnt, water speeded through the wood ashes to create lye.
[holds up a bottle]
Tyler Durden: This is lye – the crucial ingredient. The lye combined with the melted fat of the bodies, till a thick white soapy discharge crept into the river. May I see your hand, please?
[Tyler licks his lips until they're gleaming wet - he takes the Narrator's hand and kisses the back of it]
Narrator: What is this?
Tyler Durden: This…
[pours the lye on the Narrator's hand]
Tyler Durden: … is chemical burn.
 

The good news is, a lye burn isn’t QUITE as bad as they made it out to be. Or rather, it can be, but likely not with the tiny bit of wetness they got from Tyler’s kiss. That’d probably sting a bit at best, but no giant kiss-shaped scar.

So, lye. Lye is one of the required steps for soap. No lye = no soap. Instead, it’d be a detergent or something similar. Since I’ve been making soap, I’ve been playing with lye! I’m told that anyone who makes more than a couple of batches of soap is pretty much guaranteed to get a slight burn from it, and so it’s a good thing to know how to neutralize lye. And of course, anyone who’s seen Fight Club knows … water just makes it worse (it’s the reaction of lye + water that makes it baaad) but vinegar is your friend.

So, on Sunday, I was making a new batch of soap (semi-invented my own recipe, using olive oil, canola oil & sesame oil… then scented with tea tree oil & sweet orange oil, and some very old saffron that’s basically lost all its flavor, but makes for some “hey, that’s pretty!”) and, of course, was wearing my sexy black dragon gloves (amateurs can wear sissy blue gloves. Cool kids wear black. Aww yeah.)

Anyway, at one point I recall wiping my nose on my sleeve. Yes, this is gross, but I have a wicked bad cold, and I had gloves with little bits of very caustic not-quite-soap on them. Sleeves work. It’s not like it was running like crazy, I just had an itchy nose — I don’t know about you, but my nose always itches when it’s least convenient to scratch it. Like when I’m wearing gloves to protect my hands from caustic materials. I suspect that in wiping said nose with said sleeve, I may have brushed the back of my glove against my lower lip. Not a big deal, right?

Well, that’s what I thought, until I grabbed my can of diet coke, and took a swig, and … hmm, what’s that tingling…?

Hey, that’s starting to hurt. Um. Oh, shit! This is … chemical burn. Thank you, Tyler Durden.

Luckily, am smart cookie, and did not do the immediate obvious (and wrong) solution, which would be to rinse said lips with the easily available water, since I was standing next to the sink. No, instead I skedaddled over to the pantry and grabbed a bottle of vinegar and started swigging. Vinegar doesn’t usually taste very good straight up, but when your lip is starting to burn it’s rather delicious.

I rinsed my mouth a few times, making sure to spit it out over my lip as much as I could. Once the tingling stopped, I switched over to water — now to get the vinegar taste out of my mouth. Crisis averted.

Now? Well, I burned off the top layer of skin in a small spot on my lower lip. Not a big deal, it’s basically a very mild split lip. Most annoying is that it tends to re-open in the night, so I wake up with that ever so pretty spot of caked blood on my lip. That’s sexy. C’mere Nick, gimme a big sloppy kiss!

So, now I know first hand — lye is bad. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” … yeah, I’ve always been a “Lemme see this myself” sort of girl. On the upside, it makes for an interesting collection of scars.