How To Remove The Garlic Smell From Your Fingers

How do they make everything look so easy on TV?

In every cooking show, all the ingredients are lined up clean and neat and all you have to do is whip everything together and smile at the camera. And they make it all look so flawless, too. Nobody ever says that after sweating it out in the kitchen with all the mincing and trying desperately not to cut myself and inadvertently adding a hint of my own DNA-filled flavor into what I’m cooking, I’ll end up all smelly—and not the deliciously smelly kind.

It’s the garlic, really. It’s always been about the garlic.

I, for one, love garlic. But when they stick to my fingers after chopping and stay with me for DAYS, that’s an entirely different story altogether. The garlicky smell lingers on my fingers forever and haunts me in my sleep. Literally. I even feel like it could be stuck to my nose permanently and added to my sense of smell for good.

Image source: http://www.uncommongoods.com/

No amount of vigorous washing could take the garlicky smell off, but apparently, there is an easy solution on how to remove the garlic smell from your fingers, rather than scrubbing your hands raw.

As it turns out, the solution is already readily available in the kitchen. All you have to do is to rub your fingers against something stainless—it could be a spoon, a fork, or even your own kitchen sink—for about 30 seconds, while running your hands under cold water.

The chemistry behind it is this: when you rub against a stainless steel surface, the sulfur molecules from the garlic (now on your fingers when you chopped) bind themselves to the metal, effectively removing the smell off your skin. Some companies even sell a stainless soap-like thingy precisely for the purpose of removing kitchen odors.

It supposedly takes the smell right off, but it took me a few more days of rubbing against a spoon like it was a magic genie lamp before the smell came off. Still, it’s a better alternative rather than swearing off garlic forever, right?