Let’s face it, masks are yucky

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This article was published 08/06/2020 (2074 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s talk about face masks.

And by that, I mean: what it actually feels like to wear one on a regular basis. This is new for many of us, and guess what? It’s gross. It’s wet. It’s hot. You find yourself touching your face now more than ever because the mask itches or you need to adjust it. If you have glasses, your lenses fog up. Breathing is harder and a deep inhale means a deep exhale and wow does that become disgusting fast. The experience of wearing a mask — which we all need to do for all the right reasons — is miserable.

All of this discomfort will only get worse — much worse — as we head into the hottest days of summer and sweat enters the mix.

I think many of us are trying to figure out how to deal with this new normal. Maybe part of that process is just acknowledging the yuck factor. “It felt like I had a malarial swamp strapped to my jaw,” is how someone described it on Twitter. Another wryly dubbed the experience “sweltering in place.” Still another simply called it “putrid.”

I reached out to Pride Masks co-founder Alan Spaeth. His company has been making fabric masks and he validated some of my anxiety. “Let’s face it, wearing a mask isn’t the most comfortable thing,” he said. “It’s not normal to have something covering our faces, making it hard to breathe and speak. They fog up our glasses and hide our expressions.”

I asked if he had any suggestions. Fit is important. For some people, if they use cloth masks “a little bit of linen spray or washing the mask in your favourite detergent can also help, especially (one) with a calming scent like lavender.”

That’s worth a try. But the experience is psychologically uncomfortable in ways we aren’t talking about widely, either.

We’re already physically distancing ourselves from one another and masks can feel yet like another barrier to human connection, said Dr. Aderonke Bamgbose Pederson, a psychiatrist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Try picking up on sarcasm or vocal inflection when a person’s voice is muffled and you can’t see the lower half of their face.

“The way we present ourselves to the world is so much about our face,” Pederson said. “Wearing masks compromises this aspect of social engagement that’s so deep-seated in our existence in terms of connecting with each other.”

“I think a mask is supposed to create this sense of safety for people and reduce your anxiety level when you go out — because the idea is that we’re not all breathing on each other. But it also creates anxiety because it’s a constant reminder of the virus and your lack of safety. It’s paradoxical.”

In order to do something that’s uncomfortable, she said, “you have to convince yourself the need for it supersedes the discomfort: I need to wear a mask because it protects others. I need it because we have a virus that can kill people. Or make them extremely sick. I need it because we have a virus that doesn’t have a vaccine yet. I need it because we have a virus that doesn’t have a treatment yet.

“I think probably the most important thing for people to remember is that this is a new activity and any new activity we do we have to practise. When you wear a mask and it doesn’t go well one day, it doesn’t mean that you should feel like, ‘I’m not going to figure this out.’ It’s about practising: how to wear it; how to put it on; trying to only touch the loops that go around your ears or your head and cleaning your hands before and after putting it on. The more comfortable we get with the activity of it, the less anxiety-provoking it will be as it becomes part of our routine.”

By the way, Pederson offered a solution to fogged lenses: if you use a mask that doesn’t have a thin piece of metal that you can press down to ensure the mask conforms to the ridge and sides of your nose, you can use a strip of medical tape (the kind you might use to tape a couple of toes together) to create a similar kind of seal.

Before we ended our call, Pederson and I talked briefly about movies and the way directors rely on an actor’s face to convey so much subtext. This is how audiences often connect with characters — or in the case of The Dark Knight Rises and Bane, the opposite because his face and voice are so obscured by that respirator-looking mask.

“I love that image, though,” said Pederson. “I really do. Because it summarizes the anxiety and the threat to social connection. You can’t connect with that kind of character, right?

She had one more thought: “I was thinking about Castaway. Tom Hanks made a face on that ball so he could connect with it. Can you imagine if a mask was on top of that? That’s how I think people feel right now: isolated, and then when you do leave your home the people you come in contact with are wearing a mask.”

So much for that old saw about the eyes being the window to the soul, I said. Pederson thought for a moment.

“I think the eyes can only be a window into the soul because the rest of the face is there.”

— Chicago Tribune