The dangers of lye

[amvitamine]

In almost every tek it is stressed that you should be extremely careful with lye and always wear gloves and wear glasses.
I agree that getting chemicals in your eyes is something you always want to prevent but I got the basic solution on my hands a couple of times and it never did any damage.
Even when I got it on a small cut it took aprox. 30 seconds before it started to sting a little bit.
So what is the deal with the gloves?
I'm not saying people shouldn't wear gloves but maybe I am missing something as of why everyone is stressing to much on the gloves

 

[۩]

It also depends on skin type. Some skins react worse than others. And also, crystal tends to do more burning than solutions. Better safe than sorry!

 

[amvitamine]

I thought dry NaOH pellets don't do anything, since they are not dissolved in water.

 

[۩]

It does if it hangs around on skin too long

 

[AlbertKLloyd]

I've heard of severe burns from lye, disfiguring burns. It also generates an exothermic reaction, this alone can be dangerous.

It can also burn the skin so fast that no pain is felt because nerves are dead.
I've had small amounts of solution also get on my skin, but i rinsed with vinegar that i had close by just in case. I've had similar small amounts of solution splash on shirts and burn little holes in them.

It is something to be cautious with for sure, with a bit of caution and reason it is safe to work with but it can still be dangerous if mistakes are made. There are a lot of cases on record where it caused severe injury.

please be careful, you can pass your hand through a flame and not be burned, but that doesn't mean flame can't burn you, lye is kind of like fire, play safe.

 

[Coastal_Shaman]

It also depends on skin type. Some skins react worse than others. And also, crystal tends to do more burning than solutions. Better safe than sorry!

This +1 ^

It's like back in highschool shop/mechanics class when the teacher would tell us to wear gloves while washing parts in the solvent bath. I could sit there all day and wash parts with no gloves, and usually used the solvent bath to get the engine grease off my hands. A class mate tried washing parts with no gloves one day and had to go to the hospital to treat the burns he received.

*Edit... And yes, better safe than sorry. I always wear gloves when dealing with lye.

 

[Hyperspace Fool]

Like the others have said, better safe than sorry.

You can also splash boiling water on yourself without a serious burn. Some people have more oils in their skin than others.

In practice, though, you want to be safe in case of a catastrophic failure of your container or something unforseeable... like an Earthquake.

Plenty of people do extractions without gloves or goggles. People also drive without seat belts or ride motorcycles without helmets.

For people who are really concerned about lye, there ARE less caustic bases you can use. Lime works. Potassium Hydroxide as well. Both of those could burn you as well, though.

I posted a thread a while back where I showed that TSP (trisodium phosphate) can be used as the base. TSP might make your hands slippery but it is much safer than lye, and easier to neutralize by a huge degree. It is nowhere near as basic as Sodium Hydroxide, and it takes a lot of TSP to get your solution black, but TSP is actually safe enough that it has been used internally (not that I would recommend this). Truthfully even lye is often used internally... it is an ingredient in pretzels and other baked goods with that type of leathery brown skin.

 

[amvitamine]

I share your opinion about container failure.
My soup is in a 3 liter glass vase on a magnetic stirrer, stirring for days and it's on my desk next to my laptop.
I wouldn't want to get those liquids all over my stuff so I put the entire thing in a plastic crate just in case the container might break.