Vaper's Tongue

It can happen to anyone who vapes. You buy all of these delicious, flavorful liquids, and you vape, vape, vape. One day you load up your tank with your favorite e-juice and you can't taste anything. You think your battery is low or your coil is shot. You change both. You still can't taste anything. It's perplexing as there is plenty of vapor. You start trying different juices. They all taste the same, like nothing. What is going on here?

It's called Vaper's Tongue and it's quite common. If you have just quit smoking and switched to vaping, your taste buds need time to recover. You will find that not only e-juice, but food and beverages in general don't taste as flavorful as they should. This is one of the many consequences of smoking. Once you quit, your sense of taste will improve but it takes time.

Once you start vaping you have to make sure to drink plenty of water or some other beverage to keep yourself hydrated. (Coffee, beer and alcohol in general cause dehydration). Vaping can easily cause dehydration as it tends to suck up all of the moisture in your mouth. This is easily prevented by making sure to drink and vape rather than vape alone.

Another cause of vaper's tongue is lack of variety. The more you expose your tongue to the same flavor without switching it up, there more likely you will get a case of vaper's tongue. Keep at least two or three tanks of different liquids on you at all times. Rotate them. If you vape one juice exclusively, a time will come when you can't taste it anymore.

Vaper's tongue does not only affect your ability to taste e-juice, it affects your ability to taste anything. It may take two or three days to recover from a case of vaper's tongue. It is believed that PG is more likely to cause vaper's tongue than VG. If you find yourself getting cottonmouth while vaping, try switching to an all VG liquid or increasing the VG and decreasing the PG when you order your juice.

Some people suggest eating something sweet or rinsing your mouth out with mouth wash. Chocolate is said to help. It's likely that eating food in general helps as chewing food stimulates saliva production. Cinnamon flavored liquid is said to make the problem worse, so avoid e-juice with cinnamon until you recover. Others say that shocking the tongue is in order, eat something unusual like a dill pickle or an olive.

Catching a cold or getting sick in general may also cause you to lose the ability to taste. In this case, all you can really do is wait it out until you get better.

Vaper's tongue is very similar to olfactory fatigue which affects the sense of smell rather than taste.
"Olfactory fatigue, also known as odor fatigue or olfactory adaptation, is the temporary, normal inability to distinguish a particular odor after a prolonged exposure to that airborne compound. For example, when entering a restaurant initially the odor of food is often perceived as being very strong, but after time the awareness of the odor normally fades to the point where the smell is not perceptible or is much weaker. After leaving the area of high odor, the sensitivity is restored with time...Olfactory fatigue is an example of neural adaptation or sensory adaptation. The body becomes desensitized to stimuli to prevent the overloading of our nervous system, thus allowing it to respond to new stimuli that are ‘out of the ordinary’." - Wikipedia.

In reality, vaper's tongue simply requires time and hydration in order to make it go away. For more information, please read this article about taste fatigue.