Strong bases (and even fairly weak ones) will react with the fats and oils in your skin to form soap.
- The process is called saponification.
You may have noticed this if you spill sodium hydroxide or sodium carbonate solution on your fingers, this will give you a soapy feel / texture and you could be forgiven for thinking that this is how those solutions feel. NO. They are no more slippery than distilled water. It is your fingers that are turning slimy as the hydroxyl ions in the solution go to work reacting with the oils and fats in your skin.
Mild exposure like this is harmless (so long as you wash it off fairly quickly). We have plenty of oils and fats in healthy skin! However, continued exposure will result in the degradation and rotting of your skin.
Contact with the eye can result in the thin skin of the eye being perforated resulting in blindness. Worse still, if solid, or even concentrated, sodium hydroxide should get into the eye, or mouth, a great deal of heat is released as it dissolves in the water there. This can cause **BOTH **kinds of burning - **thermal **and chemical, at the same time. You only get one pair of eyes - look after them!