It tastes like drinking water from a glass that has been cleaned with dish soap but not rinsed properly and you can taste the residue and distinct smell/taste of soap. I used to have this response as a child but later as an adult the taste completely changed and now I can taste its real flavour.

It doesn't always taste like soap to me. But when it does, it literally tastes like the lather/residue from unscented bar soap. Like if you wash your hands but don't thoroughly rinse them, then eat finger food. It's a basic (as opposed to acidic) flavor, that really doesn't taste like anything other than soap.

I can’t answer your question, because it doesn’t taste like soap to me either. Just as you described, it tastes overwhelmingly strong and unpleasant to me, so I assume I have the gene. I do think sometimes it tastes appropriate buried in amongst other flavors though.

This is why I only have cilantro flavoured soap

Minute food does a good job explaining it, IMO. https://youtu.be/RZtPynXsFas

To me, it's not exactly soap but it's damn close. Like 90% of soap. Idk what else to tell you, it just does.

Palmolive. That's what it tasted like to me when I went looking for it.

I once ate a handful of cilantro to see if I could taste it, and I could, a little bit. Then I swore not to do that again because normally, I love cilantro.

Only partially related, why does no one talk about what it tastes like when you don't have the gene? Nobody told me it's like spicy mint! I was expecting something mild like basil or something. But no, it's overpowering.

I had the chance to try it for the first time a few months ago when I discovered a local restaurant sells Bahi Mi with cilantro and pickled carrots. Its delicious, but I was not expecting that flavor.

It doesn't taste soapy to me, but more like bug spray that I accidentally got in my mouth as a kid. Weirdly chemically

I don't know about the gene, and I do like cilantro. However there are times when I can understand how it tastes soapy to people. It does have a bitterness to it, and combined with its very aromatic nature, it reminds me of soap at times.

While we're at it, wtf do ants smell like?

As a kid, my mother actually did the completely stupid cliche of "washing your mouth out with soap" when I said a "bad word", so I know exactly what soap tastes like (this being cheap bar soap like Irish Spring, Zest, etc). And cilantro really does taste pretty close to that to me.

Take the smell of dawn dish soap diluted into water. That's what it tastes like.

It is a chemical aftertaste. Like a weak soap or maybe even an unscented air freshener. I can eat the food if there isn't much cilantro in it.

It's been a couple of years since I was toddler enough to just put soap in my mouth.

I can't believe how literate OP is for only being 4 years old!

I do think there's something strange with how you taste it. My partner and I both love cilantro and will eat it in abundance, no issue.

Fwiw, I have a weird taste sensitivity to all seafood. I can sense the tiniest amount of seafood in a dish because it ruins the whole thing. I've learned that most people don't taste seafood like that, so something like fish oil in kimchi doesn't taste like you licked a room temperature anchovy.

Eating a piece of cilantro while I type this. To me, it starts with a fresh but subtle flavor that then intensifies until it feels like looking directly at a light, then it dies down with the aftertaste of grass clippings

But in my mind, the taste of soap is mostly bitter, with an overwhelming tropical/fruity/citrussy flavor of whatever the producers decided to make the soap smell like.

You've never encountered a bar of unscented soap? The stuff that's made by boiling fat, lye and water? You know, soap?

I’ve never tasted soap, so I don’t know that that’s the taste I get, but it’s nasty and ruins whatever I’m eating. I won’t even walk in a Chipotle. Jerks. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is the stems are the worst part. Something that’s cooked with cilantro or has the occasional leaf is okay, but one bite of a stem and I’m done.

On a related note, I love olive oil but hate olives, because anytime a dish has olives at all, it tastes like there's too many olives. It's like the olive takes away the taste from the other ingredients and replaces everything with olive taste.

Cilantro tastes fine to me though.

Soap tastes like cilantro on account of the simple fact that cilantro existed first. Not the other way around. If you're going to eat soap some people say it tastes like cilantro.

Keep in mind, just because it doesn't taste like soap to you, doesn't mean you should like it. People have their own unique tastes. I, for instance, don't like most fish, and think that describing a thing as what it is - means it's bad - is a weird thing: "this fish is fishy" = gross. "This chicken is chickeny" = delicious.

All that said, you just don't like cilantro, that's fine. My wife doesn't like strawberries. I can't understand it, but I accept it.

I hate cilantro and other things like horseradish and wasabi but like I love jalepeno and popeye spicy chicken so its not just a heat thing. Anyway for me cilantro tastes like dirt and horseradish/wasabi just has this nasty taste. Funny thing is cilantro has become so popular I have developed a kind of resistance to it. Like I can eat something with cilantro but it will bring it down. I used to take one bite of something with cilantro and had to find something to get the taste out of my mouth. A really funny thing was I sepent a massive amount of time thinking I hated avocado because I only incountered it in guacomole which as far as I can tell always has cilantro. Man when I had just some avocado on something I was like. holy fuckin trump, this is awesome.

Imagine if you will, that prior to cooking someone hand scrubbed all the pots/pans that were going to use. But they didn't rinse them properly so there was still soap residue all over them. And then they cooked with them.

Coffee tastes exactly like hot wet loam to me. I detested the flavor.

I'm a grown ass man, and I fucking hate coffee.

I equate it more to a strong perfume than soap. When I eat cilantro it just fills the back of my nose with that overwhelming floral perfume smell (feel?).

Imagine someone loaded the dish with wintergreen bubble gum.

For me, it tastes like a stink bug had farted in my generel direction. same scent, not that intense.

It tastes like metal to me - not soap

I have that version of the gene according to 23 and Me. Note that every human has that gene, but there are slight variations in its sequence (that’s how genes work, common variants are called alleles).
All I knew was that I hated food from Mexican food trucks and restaurants. As many other people in this thread mentioned, the food sometimes tasted like dirty water in the dishwasher, or like a dish sponge. Like soap, mold, overall a dirty and disgusting muddled mess, not a specific taste. I didn’t think the taste was coming from cilantro, I thought the food was prepared with dirty equipment and spoiled ingredients.
I moved from Europe to California as an adult, and I was eating cilantro regularly, including on street tacos from food trucks, and liked the taste. The whole thing only clicked later: when cilantro is mixed in a sauce, like in the guacamole in some burritos, that’s disgusting. I also don’t like chimichurri. Freshly chopped cilantro is delicious.

I hate cilantro but I'm unsure if I have the supposed "cilantro tastes like soap gene". To me, it just feels like chunks of cardboard or plastic in my food that shouldn't be there. I tried it two or three times then stopped using it in my cooking. However, I like storebought salsa that contains cilantro so apparently I don't mind it if it's cut into really tiny pieces

It doesn't taste like soap, it tastes like Satan's dingle berries

I'm willing to bet it tastes soapy to everyone, it's just that not everyone likes it. It's another one of those weird "look at me, I'm unique" things (no, aphantasia doesn't exist either, Kevin, nobody has a TV in their head).