Have ever gotten bleach or liquid chlorine on your hand or fingers and noticed that the smell would not go away for several days?

Yeah, me too.

I thought the smell was chloramine. I thought that the chlorine reacted with ammonia that was on my skin from sweat and it produced a chloramine and that was what I smelled. I was wrong. First of all, there is way more chlorine than ammonia so it would have destroyed the ammonia, not made a chloramine. Second, I thought washing my hands with soap and water would remove it. It didn't. It must be something else.

What we have all been smelling is L-pyrroline. L-pyrroline is formed from the amino acid L-proline when the keratin protein found in the stratum corneum layers of the skin is exposed to free chlorine or other halogens.

How much L-pyrroline is formed varies from person to person but the mechanism is the same. The degradation of skin protein is believed to begin with the rapid chlorination of a protein of an amide protein bond when the skin is exposed to chlorine. If this N-chlorination occurs adjacent to the amino acid L-proline, the ensuing protein fragmentation results in the formation of L-pyrroline. Once the N-chlorination has occurred, the formation of the odor on the skin will continue for several days.

So far I have not found anything that will remove the smell except time. If any of you have found something that will remove the smell, I would sure like to learn about it.

Another one of life's mysteries solved or at least explained. FYI Y'all.

Thank you for sharing this very interesting information. Please add an attribution link when you copy/paste from another source.

You could try rubbing your hands with a bar of stainless steel. This is a method cooks have used to remove onion and garlic smells from their hands.

Or you could wear gloves when pouring bleach.

I have one of the "onion bars" and while it works great for onion smell, it doesn't do anything for the bleach smell.

In addition, normal 6% bleach isn't anywhere near as bad as the 73% cal-hypo!

Terry in NC

What's wrong with hands smelling like chlorine (please don't tell me it's not normal )

Hydrogen Peroxide (3 % from the drugstore) or vitamin C (crushed up into a powder and made into a patste) might work. I haven't tried it, so I am just speculating.

I use GOJO.