Face Mask Design Has a Long Way to Go
Will the marketplace of ideas have enough time for significant improvements?
My father has one regular ear and one misshapen ear. It’s not really an ear, but a series of grafts upon grafts that plastic surgeons shaped into something suggestive of an ear after my dad lost it in a burning accident when he was a child.
My dad’s reconstructed ear barely has a helix, the outermost part of the cartilage we can bend and twist any which way. The near absence of this tissue has turned out to be a real inconvenience these days, what with COVID-19 and the need to wear a face mask, a precaution both my parents take very seriously. There’s not enough of a fold between my dad’s ear and head so the elastic slides out.
Masks with straps that wrap around the head would seem like a better option for him. Thing is, the back of my father’s head happens to be quite flat and his hair’s wispy and thin, so the elastics slide down and end up around his neck. Given the design of such masks, when the elastics don’t stay where they’re supposed to, the mask doesn’t cover the mouth and nose properly.
No good solution has been found.
My mother has tried various hacks. The best one has been to connect the elastics that should go around…
