How to stop your glasses from fogging up when wearing a mask

Handy hack from a longtime Japanese mask wearer.

Our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa has been wearing a mask on-and-off since…well, as long as he can remember. While his mask wearing was previously limited to hay fever season, colds and flus, and times when he wanted to keep his nose warm from the cold, these days he doesn’t step out of the house without wearing a face covering.

In fact, he’s been wearing a mask every day for about two years now, throughout the whole pandemic, but as a glasses wearer, there’s been one big downfall — he’s had to battle the fog on his lenses every day.

Seiji has tried all sorts of methods to stop his glasses from fogging up while wearing a mask — he’s loosened the mask around his nose, as seen below, but all that did was direct the vapour from his breath up onto the lenses.

He also tried pulling the mask as far down his nose as possible, but that also funnelled the vapour up to the lenses.

After two years of experimenting with different tricks and ideas, Seiji now believes he’s found a solution that works, and it’s so simple it doesn’t require any special setup or extra accessories.

The only thing you’ll need is a fabric mask with a hard insert in the top area so you can make it fit nice and snug around your nose.

This snug moulding is key to stopping your glasses from fogging up, but you’ll need to deploy one more trick for this hack to work — raise the mask as high as you can on your nose.

This may seem counterintuitive, as the natural reaction to foggy glasses is to push the mask away from the lenses rather than towards them, but Seiji swears by this trick. The position of the mask is vital to clearing your vision, and Seiji recommends aiming for a spot where the top of the mask just kisses your bottom lashline.

Once you’ve got your mask up high, simply pop your glasses on and allow them to rest on the mask instead of your cheeks. This slight pressure helps to seal the opening even further, keeping your glasses fog-free.

The final step is to raise the lower part of the mask slightly, so that instead of it covering the entire chin, it sits just under the chin. This widens the airspace around your mouth, which decreases the pressure on the air that escapes.

▼ The bottom part of the mask should feel like it’s sitting on the chin.

Seiji has been wearing his mask like this for a while now and it’s never failed him, so feel free to give it a try and let your bespectacled buddies know about it as well.

Now that his vision is happily fog-free, Seiji hopes his advice will help to clear the mist for others. And if you know anyone who’s in need of advice on hair transplants, Seiji’s here to help with that too.

Top image: Pakutaso
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