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By Ben Goldman
My family paid attention when Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a recent press conference stressed wearing a mask if we must leave our home.
But as we prepared our masks, we discovered a minor problem: my mother wears glasses. And within seconds of putting on her mask, they fogged up.
And she isn’t alone.
“I did wear a mask for an appointment I had recently, and my glasses were extremely steamy and annoying the whole time,” said Lizzie Irwin, of Plainwell, Michigan. She found it difficult to concentrate.
East Lansing resident Ratna Raja has a theory as to why her glasses fog while wearing a mask: “I think it depends on the mask. If a mask has a lot of openings, then I think it will fog up.”
Dr. Tiffany Zair-Yalda, an optometrist at Michigan Eye and Contact Lens in Novi, Michigan, agrees.
You can decrease the amount of fogging by simply “sealing the top of the mask with tape,” Zair-Yalda said. She suggests medical tape or something similar.
Contact lenses are another alternative.
“Contact lenses are a great option and safe even during a pandemic,” Zair-Yalda said.
But if you must wear glasses, fogging can be a problem, said Dr. Brian Hales, an optometrist at Mid Michigan Family Eye Care in Clare, Michigan.
“It’s 100% an issue,” Hales said. “In America, there’s not a ton of people that wear masks. Now there’s going to be.”
Hales has three solutions to foggy glasses.
First, wearing smaller glasses allow the lenses to sit further from the face, he said. That allows them to be better ventilated. However, not many people own multiple pairs of eyeglasses.
So Hales recommends a simpler method.
“The easiest way that you can help mitigate it is to use a surfactant,” he said. “Washing your glasses with something as simple as soap usually does pretty well.”
This method has been practiced for nearly a decade, when a 2011 study found that the best way to prevent fogging was to “wash the spectacles with soapy water and shake off the excess,” immediately before putting on the glasses.
Soapy water reduces surface tension which reduces the spread of your breath’s water molecules that would otherwise cause fogginess, according to the study.
But for it to work, you must be persistent.
“It’s something that you kind of have to keep doing to help the fog show up not so much,” Hale said. He also recommended anti fog spray, if you don’t have immediate access to soap.
“The other things you can do are more mechanical things,” Hale said. “Folding up a piece of Kleenex into a rectangle can catch more humidity before it gets to your mask,” if placed at the top of your mask.
While this method can work, for best results Hale stresses, “The two big ones are soap and anti fog sprays.”
Don’t just take Hale’s word for it. We tried the soap method. And nine years after the original study was published, it worked