Do you have Vape Tongue? Does this sound familiar to you – You vape your eCig with your favourite eliquid flavour inside and it tastes bland. Do you sometimes find your go to juice just isn’t doing it for you anymore?
This phenomenon is known as vape tongue and can even leave your tongue feeling numb. The same thing can happen when you lose the taste for a food you enjoy because you have it too much.
In this post, we try to find out why this happens, how to avoid vape tongue and how to cure the symptoms.
Possible Causes Of Vape Tongue
Vaping One Flavour For A Long Time
There is no scientific data to back this theory up, but just about every vapour has experienced the same thing. You buy an e-juice, love the taste, then after two weeks of vaping loads you lose a taste for it. Your favourite flavour becomes bland and tasteless.
Damaged Taste Buds
Unfortunately, taste buds get damaged and could lead to a numb tongue combined with vaping. Causes of taste bud loss include smoking, infections, alcohol, extremely sour foods, spicy foods and some medications. Fortunately, taste buds heal, but get weaker as you get older (which is one reason your tastes change so much in the time between childhood to adulthood.) As we’ve seen, it can take up to two weeks for taste buds to regrow, so it could be a little time before you fully regain your sense of taste and enjoy your favourite flavour again.
Dehydration
Another possible cause of loss of taste is dehydration inside the mouth. While a glass of water should help you, sometimes the vape tongue symptoms do come back quite frequently. You may find that drinking something with a little citric acid in might help. Orange juice or lemon cordial may just help regain the moistness and as a result flavour should improve.
Blocked Nasal Passages
Having a blocked nose can alter the vaping experience a lot. If your nose is blocked, it will affect how you taste, particularly with more complex tones. Familiar flavours will become muted or none existent.
Feeling Ill
When you’re feeling under the weather with a cold or the flu vaping can become very different. If your throat is quite sore, we do not advise vaping, but if you do you may experience vape tongue more frequently.
Medication and Tablets
Many medicines can also lead to a loss of taste. These include:
Griseofulvin, Captopril, Penicillamine, Thyroid drugs, Rifampin, Lithium, Procarbazine, Cancer Treatments.
If you have vaper’s tongue and taking one of these drugs, that may just be the cause.
Dry Mouth
A lack of saliva also causes dry mouth, and you’re likely to experience it from time to time (especially as you get older). Unfortunately, it can also lead to a loss of taste and vaping will only dry this up further.
Stress
Anxiety can also cause tastes to change. Extra stress causes more breathing through your mouth with accelerated heart rates and higher breathing rates this can dry out your tongue. You usually vape harder under stress, this combined with the dry tongue can lead to vapers tongue and flavours not tasting how you remember.
Old Eliquid
As eLiquids get older some can taste even better as the flavour steeps, but some flavours can degrade, sometimes leading to a strange taste. So vapers tongue isn’t always vapers tongue. If your eliquid is old and not used for a while, it could just mean go out and get some new liquid.
Dirty Coils and Crusty Tanks
If you are using old coils, swapping flavours in the same coils, have a dirty crusty tank or 510 connector, this may cause changes in tastes and vape efficiency. Just completely dismantle your tank and coils, get new coils if you have to, give everything a good clean and inspection, then reassemble.
Recently Gave Up Cigarettes
Yes, smoking can damage taste and smell. In fact, many vapers have reported coming down in the morning a couple of weeks after their last cigarette and being hit by the fresh smell of coffee brewing, regaining some of those lost smell receptors.
While this is a great thing, after quitting smoking blood vessels regain their size, taste buds come back that have been dormant for so long, and all of this can lead to a numb tongue and sometimes ulcers, all of which usually clears after a couple of weeks.
How To Help Stop Vapers Tongue
Drink water
Drinking water can also help if your vapers tongue is the result of dry mouth or dehydration. Just have a drink, give it 5 minutes, and see if that hits the spot.
Smelling Something Strong
Having a good long smell of something very flavoursome or string can often fire up the taste buds and get them working again. The smell of fresh coffee or smelling some food you enjoy can liven up the taste buds and get you salivating again.
Drinking Lemon/ Lime Cordial
Citrus fruit juices and cordials are often used in food tasting between samples to reset the palette to allow a more accurate taste of the next course. In the same way, this can reset your taste buds to make your eliquid taste as it should.
Change Your Usual Eliquid Flavour
This easy solution usually works great. Just swap to a completely different flavour for around two weeks. When you swap back, your old trusty flavour tastes great again.
Vape Menthol Eliquid
Here is something with a great amount of success. If you usually don’t vape menthol flavours, then just make the swap for 2 weeks and when you return to your fruity favourite, it’s like it should be, vapers tongue gone!
If you usually go for a fruit/menthol blend, then use straight menthol or mint for 2 weeks with no fruit in it. When you return, you will taste the fruits again.
Use a stronger flavour
If your juice is has weak flavour strength anyway, and you prefer the subtle hints and tones, maybe it’s time to step it up a notch and go for something with just a little more taste to it.
Mouth wash
This is a double-edged sword. Some say this helps, and others believe this is a cause. I suppose it boils down to how often you use mouthwash and the brand you use. Maybe help us in the comments section below with your opinion.
Using Steeped Juices
What is steeping? Steeping is a process that involves leaving your eliquid for a while, somewhere dark and airy, to allow the flavours to blend properly. Freshly made eliquid, particularly custard, caramel and cake flavours, usually taste a bit different or even bitter if they are too fresh. Giving the eliquid a good shake, then leaving it alone for a few weeks, can often spring a flavour back to life if you have just bought it.
Stop Those Stinky Ciggies
If you swap between your cigarettes and your e-cigarette then this is proberly the cause. Cigarettes not only cause many health issues, but degrades taste buds dramatically. We advise you to finally give yourself a push and get off those ciggies for good.
How Taste Works
Tongues are covered by up to 10000 taste buds. Taste buds, scientifically known as gustatory calyculi, are crucial to tasting subtle flavours and distinguishing one flavour from another. Not everyone has an equal amount of taste buds. The young and the none smokers will all generally have a lot of taste buds, reaching figures close to the 10000 mark. However older people, people who drink and smoke cigarettes a lot, maybe have as little as 2000 taste buds.
The difference in people’s taste buds might also explain why some people preferred steeped eliquid and other people find it hard to tell the difference.
The cells that make up your taste buds diminish and regenerate very rapidly. This cycle of regeneration can take anything from 10 days to 2 weeks to fully replace all 10000 of your taste buds. People with damaged palettes can not reproduce cells as rapidly causing the drop in the number of taste buds they have. All of which can affect the way you interpret the flavour.
Your tongue can distinguish between these flavour types. Sweet, Sour, Salt, Bitter, Umami (savoury, also known as the fifth taste). But taste is not only detected within the mouth. In fact, researchers in one study asked tea tasters to block their noses. The tea tasters, renowned for their sense of taste, were shocked to discover that when they couldn’t smell, they were unable to distinguish between different teas.
Interestingly too, the way we remember tastes can change not the taste directly. We can remember things incorrectly, and get confused about what we really tasted if enough time has passed. It’s well known that tastes change as you get older, but there are a variety of factors that can change taste.
Maybe this has happened to you, you try a new food and you really like it. It becomes a favourite and after a couple of months of eating it you go off it. Somehow it doesn’t wow you anymore as it did. Have something too much and you lose a taste for it. This is not limited to food and now it seems vape tongue is the equivalent for vapers everywhere.
If you have any opinions about vape tongue, it’s causes or any advice to our readers, please comment below.