You Should Know

Don’t cut the root off either. Use it to hold the onion together and in my experience also seems to lessen the effect on my eyes.

This is true. (re: droplets; study also rejects the chilling method). People in my experience don't understand how much safer a sharp knife is until you put one in their hands and get them to just try it.

Otherwise, though, the "fume hood" approach seems extremely excessive when a cheap, comfortable, unobstructive pair of goggles is likely to work more consistently and with less thought. I merrily chop with my cutting board wherever I want and standing however I want.

A sharp knife is something you should be using regardless, but these other methods like meticulous posture, fume hoods, pre-soaking, etc. all seem more convoluted and varying degrees of less effective than grabbing some goggles from a drawer and putting them on your face.

We vegans kind of slide everything over, so slaughtering animals becomes unthinkable, and butchering vegetables becomes sad.

as a kid I developed a resistance working in a kitchen

as an adult it somewhat continued due to onions being an important part of every meal

but sometimes you just get one of those fuckers that's so goddamn juicy that the mere sight of it brings you to tears

I think so?? Some of it depends, I think, on the variety of onion (e.g. I've always found sweet onions to be gentler compared to white onions). I don't always cry without them per se, but it still feels noxious.

Onions don't bother me either. I used to volunteer to cut them doing prep work so my co-workers didn't have to cry. I think we're just lucky. I guess it's our lame superpower.

I honestly thought it was just me. No reaction at all, dull knife white onions nothing

Provably so!

Then all of a sudden your goggles are filled with tears.

I feel plenty alive wearing swimming goggles in my kitchen.

A Metal Gear villain in the making.

Oh, with a denim apron and lab goggles, I look like a bootleg Jesse Pinkman. But that kind of makes things a bit more fun in its own way.

Congratulations on adding three pushups to your weightlifting regimen.

Yeah, I mention those at the top, but doesn't work for people who need/want to wear glasses. Plus, at least to me, putting on swim goggles dry pulls on my hair and is uncomfortable. Lab goggles are the more generalized – and arguably comfortable – solution, and realistically, there's no issue with the lab goggles' seal (the mistake I made one time was because I was being an idiot and wouldn't have been prevented by swim goggles).

Presoaking and making the cut slightly more dangerous seems like a silly solution when you have a pair of goggles in a drawer unless you're waiting for your soon-to-be-only pair of goggles in the mail. Especially because all you're likely to be doing is kind of watering down the droplets, making it less bad.

Some of the suggestions in the replies are kind of baffling to me in the face of an effectively foolproof, dirt-cheap, comfortable, and trivial solution with basically no downsides. Like you do you, but "yeah, just hold water in your mouth for the indeterminate amount of time you spend cutting up onions" is so ridiculous compared to just saying "here, try some basic PPE".

It's hard to imagine even doing that routinely without thinking "surely there's a better way??" and stumbling upon this.