get blue gloves. they will be easier to see if you accidentally cut off a bit of them and need to retrieve it from the food

They aren’t cut proof by any means but they will help with the smell on your hands.

I work in environmental/hazardous waste investigation and remediation. The color of the nitrile gloves doesn’t make a difference in the chemical resistance of them. A sharp hook or knife will go through the nitrile just as readily as your skin. I recommend buying nitrile coated cut resistant gloves. These are made of fabric with kevlar strands woven through them and then dipped in nitrile primarily for grip. You can wear standard nitrile gloves underneath them for chemical/smell protection. The kevlar woven gloves are good for accidental slips with a sharp object but may not stand up to intentional cutting/puncturing. There are different grades of cut and puncture resistance depending on the weave.

As another commenter noted they come in different thicknesses. I think they also vary in quality, and the quality fades with age. I got some mechanic gloves which tore if you looked at them but they were thick. I’ve got some surgical gloves you can practically stab with knife and not puncture and they’re thin.

Your reasons for using gloves are good, but I have a pet peeve about people using gloves as a panacea (likely inflamed by people using them during covid). When you’re using gloves for cooking, every time you would wash your hands is a time you need to change gloves. That means you need to change gloves a lot. I almost never see people changing out with the frequency that’s necessary.

Color is irrelevant.

But nitrile gloves are very specifically for tear and puncture resistance. Not totally immune to either, but you aren’t going to have them happen with normal cooking tasks.

Then again, if you’re wearing the right size, it’s not exactly common with latex under normal conditions. Latex, however, isn’t always kept in ideal storage conditions (which nitrile is less damaged by), and is less friendly to being stretched while remaining intact. Makes the sizing more important than with nitrile.

I’ll pop large and some extra large gloves just putting them on. Vinyl in particular is horrible about it; way, way worse than latex in that regard. Nitrile isn’t quite as stretchy as latex in that instead of it stretching and you getting your hand in when it’s too small, you just can’t get it on. But, with that elasticity, the latex thins, and will eventually snap or is too easy to cause a puncture with rough edges (as opposed to actual sharps)

I was in the medical field for twenty years. Most of the time, employers just get the cheapest they can and one size. I cured every place I worked at of that, if I stayed long enough. At one home health place, there was a case on a shelf labelled with my name because nobody else needed the xxl gloves at all. But one of the ladies that managed supplies had been giving them out to anyone if other sizes were low, or they’d get snagged by other NAs too lazy to check when she wasn’t there.

The department head got pissed at the spike in xxl orders and was all mad at me for wasting gloves, which was a very interesting conversation once I reminded her I hadn’t been to the office in three weeks, and thus couldn’t have depleted the inventory at all recently, and insisted she check.

Anyway, point is that a lot of people don’t realize that exam gloves come in bigger sizes for ham fisted sasquatches, and very often don’t know what size they should actually be wearing. Most manufacturers have a chart. You measure around the widest part of both hands and use the size of the biggest hand as what you get. If you’re between sizes, go up, not down. Don’t waste time or money on “one size fits all” because not only is it never true, they’re almost always the shittiest gloves you can buy.

9/10 times, if you’re popping gloves regularly, it’s a size issue or a quality issue with the latex. The 1/10 accounts for environmental variables, and is usually only when an entire box gets left in high heat or other damaging conditions. Most cooked food is hot enough to weaken latex with extended contact, but you really shouldn’t run into problems with good quality gloves any other time. I’d still rather spend on nitrile (and do when I’m buying) since they’re more versatile anyway.

The cases where nitrile is undesirable, you just aren’t going to run into in the kitchen or other household tasks.

But color has nothing to do with how nitrile holds up. Nitrile is roughly the same color as latex in its raw form, and gets dyed purely so that they’re easy to visually differentiate in a rush. Iirc, blue was the first color they got made in, and it wasn’t until they started selling decently outside of medical uses that other colors became available. But there’s zero difference in the colors otherwise.

I’ve never noticed a difference in price between colors of the same brand either, as far as that goes. So if you don’t want black, they don’t really have any advantages over whatever. So you can usually just grab gloves on sale and be fine with whatever.

Myself, there’s a brand called London labs that makes textured nitrile gloves with the sub brand gripxx. Would never want to use them for patient care, but for kitchen and car uses, they rock. There’s other brands that do textured, those are just easy to find online. If you don’t want textured, any brand works. Some brands are not even different gloves; they’re made under contract at the same factories with identical properties, just branded different. Any time you see something barely branded, or with some weird name, chances are high they’re essentially generic.

For kitchen use, you’re fine with the thinner ones. I think they get as thin as 4 mils? You’ll see more 5 and 6 mil overall though, and that sometimes means the thicker ones are actually less expensive. 10 mil is the thickest I’ve ever used, and there’s zero point to it for anything you’ll be doing at home normally. They’re harder to feel things in. Iirc, the ones thicker than that are also manufactured differently, but I’ve never looked into what that difference is.

Price wise, expect to pay 5 cents (us) a glove at the cheap end, usually for 4 mil. You can get up to around 15 cents for 6 mil if you’re buying one box at a time. Buying a case is usually enough cheaper to be worth doing even if you aren’t using them daily. Nitrile can be stored in household conditions for years without degrading.

I wouldn’t pay anything over 10 cents though, tbh, even in single boxes. There’s just too little variance in quality between brands, so you don’t benefit anything just because the company is a bigger name. My preferred brand runs up to 15 cents per glove in single boxes of 6 mil, and around 8 cents per glove in a case. I tend to go with 6 mil for the tiny extra bit of grip that brand has at that thickness, but 4 mil is really all a cook needs for food handling. And it isn’t like even the 8 and 10 mil will totally prevent a knife from slicing or piercing through, so that’s not a real factor.

I’m fairly sure that the black ones got popular for aesthetics alone. They don’t have any benefits over other colors in terms of function, and they’re actually less beneficial in a few niche circumstances in medical use. Harder to see some fluids against black, and it can be harder to track what your hands are doing visually. Plus, harder to see in the trash or in poor lighting, but that’s only very rarely important

The color doesn’t make any difference with how the gloves function. The color is aesthetic or in some cases, organizational, e.g. green for food handling and blue for medical.

Nitrile gloves come in different thicknesses, which changes how strong they are and how tactile. For food handling, the thinnest 2-3mm is usually fine; you still get good feeling through them and they’re cheap so you can swap them out to avoid cross contamination.

If cutting fish, you may want slightly thicker gloves, like 4-5mm or 6-7mm, so they hold up better. But if solely for smell/fluids contact, the 2-3mm should do you.

People who work selling fish wear latex gloves, the same ones for washing dishes, that you can buy at the supermarket for a euro.

Black are usually thicker, so they last longer.

Medical is blue so that a single drop of blood is highly visible, and to be changed often to prevent contamination.

Black was used for the opposite reason, easy to hide stains and thicker so that they can be worn longer or even taken off and put back on.

Because black was thicker it was more expensive…

So people started selling thin black ones, and now color doesn’t matter. You need to pay attention to thickness, and it really doesn’t matter.

If you’re worried about cuts get safety gloves and put them on over the nitrate gloves. You don’t need one on your knife hand.