Foggy glasses!

We’re already dealing with a pandemic, do we really need foggy glasses on top of everything else? If you wear prescription glasses, or even just sunglasses, you know what I'm talking about; you put on your face mask, you go outside, and within five minutes your glasses are fogged up. So you tip your head up a little bit, then you try walking with your head down to see if that helps, then you try to adjust your glasses, then you try to adjust your mask, and none of it actually seems to work. In the search for a solution, I started by looking at why my glasses were fogging up in the first place. It's actually pretty logical once you to start to think about it. Your warm breath escapes through the top of your mask, hitting the cooler surface of your glasses, and then they fog up. It's kind of the same principle as when you walk from the hot outdoors into an air-conditioned building. In my browsing around the Internet looking for the best foggy glasses hack, I didn’t find just one right answer. So I thought I'd share a few of the tips that have worked for me, or worked at least some of the time.

Get a mask that fits. Make sure you're wearing a face mask that fits you right. There should be kind of a seal around the top of your mask where it touches your face, and if the seal is good then you won't get as much air escaping through the top of the face mask. An easy way to improve the seal is to make sure you're wearing a mask that has an adjustable nose bridge or clip so that you can adjust it to fit your face, or if you don’t have a mask with a nose bridge, but are serious about de-fogging, you can try putting a piece of double-sided tape over the bridge of your nose so the mask sits more securely. N95 respirator masks and Silken N95's both tend to have a good seal, so if you usually wear one of those, you probably don’t run into the fogging issue as often. Buff scarf or neck gaiter tube scarf mask styles may or may not have a good seal; so when shopping around, choose one like the Respilon R-shield that has an adjustable nose bridge. The worst offenders in terms of fogged up glasses are the blue disposable surgical masks and basic cloth masks. They often fit loosely and do not seal well over the nose.

Seal your mask with your glasses. This is an easy one that you can do with standard surgical face masks or R-shield scarf type masks; simply pull the mask up under your glasses and place the glasses onto the mask over the bridge of your nose. This forms a better seal and should help keep them from fogging up. I found this doesn't work as well with the duckbill style N95 mask.

The soap and water trick: if you're wearing just normal glasses, not the kind that have an anti-glare or other protective coating on them ( this hack might ruin the coating!!), you can simply rinse your glasses in hot soapy water and let them dry. This will create kind of a film on the glasses that will keep the fog from forming.

Buy a spray: if nothing else seems to work, you can always buy an anti-fogging glasses spray. There are tons of them around a lot of us use them in the summer to help deal with the air conditioning problem. With this one, do be careful to read the label before you buy. Some of the sprays can be a bit aggressive and will ruin the (expensive) protective coatings on your glasses.

Hope that helps!