I'm taking psychotropic drugs which reduce my sense of taste.
Would I be able to create something stronger than retail juice?
If you do decide on DIY get some Capella Super Sweet. It should help you taste your mixes better as it acts on the tongue rather than it all being in the nose. It's very sweet so use fairly sparingly. I use around 0.5% in most of my mixes but you can use a bit more or less depending on how sweet you like it. A 10ml bottle should last you quite a while.
Have you been on alltheflavors.com? Maybe find a recipe with a good rating that you like the sound of and just buy 10ml of all the flavours you'll need to make that. Then you can see if DIY is right for you without spending tons of money and time trying to create a recipe yourself. It's easy to end up with a muddled, muted mix as a beginner. There a lot of bad flavours out there and it's easy to misuse flavours if you don't understand their properties. If you had trouble tasting it you wouldn't know if it was the recipe or the medication that's causing it.
This is an excellent answer.
The 2nd paragraph is excellent advice. The first one, touting Super Sweet as a flavor enhancer, I cannot agree with.
Do you not find sweetner helps? When I first started mixing I got terrible vapers tongue. It lasted for the best part of a year and it drove me crazy. A little Super Sweet enabled me to taste things- maybe not perfectly, but it did help. Ive heard it can help strawberry non tasters to some extent too. But I don’t have any first hand experience with that.
I'm no expert, but keep in mind that more aroma does not equal more flavour
It might be more accurate to say that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
I take neurological meds that do the same. You may have to experiment a little, but yes, you can. I might not have been super confident when I first started DIY, but now I can look at a recipe and know if I need to tinker or not to get stronger flavor without oversweetening (EDIT: for example, 9.5 times out of ten, if a recipe has a flavor percentage of 5-7%, I typically double the percentages of each flavor in the recipe. Less than 10-12% total flavor at minimum and I can't taste a thing).
You'll need to be willing to experiment and be willing to toss something that just doesn't come out right. There's a bunch of flavor notes hanging around here on Reddit that you find with the search function. They'll give you an excellent starting point for percentages and will often tell you if a flavor brings out or overpowers other flavors.
TL;DR - yes, but you'll need to do some reading and experimenting to find what suits you.
I personally wouldn't give a newbie the idea to just take any recipe and double the amount of flavoring. Many recipes use flavors that are close to or at the limit of their usable range, and doubling them could produce all kinds of nasty off-notes. It takes a pretty extensive flavor knowledge to know which flavors can be doubled like that without having adverse effects.
You... might want to re-read what you're commenting on. Allow me to highlight the pertinent parts (which is pretty much everything except one sentence where I gave an example that said I do something because of my tastes).
> You may have to experiment a little
> I might not have been super confident when I first started DIY, but now I can look at a recipe and know
> You'll need to be willing to experiment and be willing to toss something that just doesn't come out right. There's a bunch of flavor notes hanging around here on Reddit that you find with the search function. They'll give you an excellent starting point for percentages and will often tell you if a flavor brings out or overpowers other flavors.
> you'll need to do some reading and experimenting to find what suits you
I read all of that. It was all good advice. Everything except for your edit, your first intuition is usually right and you should not have added the edit. Relax dude, you might want to go back and re-read my comment because I didn't say anything negative about all of that stuff that you just had to reiterate trying to make your point.
Does is it reduce sense of taste as in your taste buds aren't working? Becasue AFAIK vape flavor is mainly taken in through olfactory senses, so if your taste buds are the problem you'll probably taste the vape juice still. And yeah you could make yourself something super potent with flavor, but that's pretty much what retail juice is, way too much flavor and sweetener.
I have a good friend that can not smell and barely taste anything. In the juice I make him I use nicotine in pg. Nicotine vg is smoother vs pg has a little more throat hit. And then I have maken him juices of all different flavor profiles until we found a couple he could barely taste. Good luck
You would be able to mix something similar to commercial juice, if you wanted to. For the most part, we use the same flavors that they do. But there's a limit to the amount of flavoring that you can use. Using too much flavoring actually has the opposite effect and can mute the flavor.