If you are like me, cutting onions makes your eyes burn like someone threw acid on them. This is actually quite an accurate analogy, because the final prodcut of the chemical pathway that is triggered while cutting onions is in fact an acid - sulfuric acid. In an attempt to prevent this common cry-tastrophy, I searched for a solution to prevent me from crying every few days from cutting onions. I found onion goggles were the most popular solution out of the long list of crazy hacks and old wives tales. Who honestly thinks that a wet paper towel will magically attact onion gas that rises faster than air? I bought a pair of the most popular style of onion gogges to try. Here is my story:
Unboxing The Onion Goggles:
They arrived in a cheap plastic packet typical of most drop-shipped items, likely straight from the manufacturer overseas. The onion goggles were extremely light and fragile. The material was rigid and not very malleable. There was no way to mould this pair of onion goggles to your face.
Overview of The Onion Goggles Design:
The deep purple color was nice and unique and seemed to be the best part of the goggles so far. The back of the frames were soft and smooth for better comfort.
I was curious about why the back of the frames that presses against your face had a couple of slots in them. These seem counter-intuitive as the lighter than air onion gas can easily get into those channels. Upon further thought, I concluded that these channels are likely to reduce fogging.
Putting Onion Goggles to The Test:
We had two parts to our test. The smoke test and the onion cutting test.
We felt it necessary to use a smoke test so that we could visualize the behavior of a gas around the onion goggles. As you may know onion gas (syn-promanethial-S-oxide) is a colorless gas that we cannot see.
We used a handheld smoke machine to disperse smoke towards my face while I was wearning the goggles. We recorded whether the smoke was present between my eyes and the goggles. The results were disappointing as there was a substantial amount of smoke present. It seemed to get past the onion goggles as they were not a perfect fit and left a fairly large gap in the one saide. There was also smoke rising through the channels we spoke about earlier.
We selected the onion variety most likely to cause tears, a yellow onion. I placed the purple onion goggles on my face and hacked away at the yellow onion. At first, it thought that they were working, but unfortunately my joy was short lived as I felt that familiar sting before the waterworks.
I concluded that despite being the most popular option of onion goggles on Amazon, they just do not work. It seems that you cannot have a pair of onion goggles that half works, it should either be 100% effective or not at all.