What protects the maker
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Hot sauce is one of the few food crafts with a genuine occupational hazard, and it is the ingredient the whole product is about.
Capsaicin is the hazard
Capsaicin is an irritant that becomes airborne readily during grinding, blending and cooking, and that transfers from surfaces to hands to eyes with remarkable efficiency.
The critical property: it is not water soluble. Rinsing with water spreads it rather than removing it, which is why the instinctive response makes things worse.
What it actually does
On skin, burning that persists for hours and is worse on thin skin and in cuts. In eyes, severe pain and temporary incapacity. Airborne, coughing, streaming eyes and breathing difficulty at concentrations lower than people expect.
Cooking a large batch of chilies produces a vapor that will clear a building, and that is not a figure of speech. A superhot variety being blended in an unventilated room is a genuine incident.
It also lingers: on equipment, on surfaces, on the outside of containers, and on anything that touched your gloves.
What to wear
Nitrile gloves, changed rather than washed, and long enough to cover the wrist. Never handle chilies bare-handed at production quantity.
Eye protection, sealed rather than open-sided, for grinding and blending.
A fitted particulate mask for dry grinding, and a respirator for superhots at volume.
And clothing you can take off. Capsaicin on a sleeve reaches your face hours later.
For contamination: oil or dairy rather than water, because capsaicin dissolves in fat. Wash equipment with detergent and hot water rather than rinsing.
The room, and everyone in it
Ventilation does more than anything you wear. Extraction at the source, an open window, a fan pulling air away rather than around.
And tell people. A batch of superhots cooking affects anybody in the building, including neighbors in a shared facility, and it is the kind of thing that ends an arrangement if it arrives as a surprise.