The air is getting more dangerous to breathe all over the world — and a suite of companies are hoping to capitalize with a new fashion item.
And a poor fit in this case isn’t just annoying — if a protective air mask doesn’t fit just right, it’s almost counterproductive. Due to physics, any gap in the seal acts like a straw, sucking the harmful particles directly into your mouth.
To fix this, Hosmer and his team partnered with a researcher at Hong Kong Polytechnic University that was already doing a big facial biometrics scanning project, and used that data to create a mask that actually fit the average East Asian face. In China, the masks are approved by the China Occupational Safety & Health Association all the way down to PM0.3, almost 10 times smaller than the standard PM2.5 masks. But when Airpop sent the mask to the United States for third-party testing, the team saw strange results. What they finally realized was that for the “fit” part of the test, where real people wear the mask and perform various tasks, American labs were using almost exclusively Caucasians. Eventually, they decided to simply forgo American certifications and focus on the Chinese market.
Today, Airpop masks are sold all over China as well as online for $50. They come in a variety of colors and look more like a fancy Nike shoe than a surgeon’s protective covering. And Airpop is not alone. A company called Freka sells stylish masks for more than $100 apiece. Lifestyle bloggers in places like China and India even review masks as fashion items.
Shilpa Gandotra, an Indian woman who writes a blog called Our External World, told me she still wears the Vogmask she reviewed in 2016. “Diwali time in India is the height of pollution, so that is one time frame where the mask is essential,” she told me. “I literally carry this mask in my purse so that whenever I need it, I can wear it and save myself from bad-quality air.” But in the United States, there might be more of a hurdle to get people to wear masks in the first place.
During the Camp Fire, Vogmask, a local Northern California company (which sells its masks for $33 to $44 each), found itself inundated with orders — co-founder Wendover Brown told me that their sales increased to 10 times their normal level. But Vogmask has been selling its colorful air filtration masks since 2011, after one fateful day at Burning Man. “When we first conjured the idea, we were wearing bandanas to protect ourselves from the dust,” says Marc Brown, Wendover’s son and co-founder. “And other people were wearing white painter’s masks, and it occurred to me to make real dust masks that looked as nice as bandanas.”
