After two plus years of wearing a mask a lot of the time, I have become very aware of the many impacts mask wearing is having on my life. There are personal impacts like drier skin and different makeup needs, but there are also impacts on the ability to listen and talk to people effectively. I wear hearing aids and have for many years, but I had no idea how much I relied on being able to see a person’s mouth when they speak.
On the cosmetic side, masks seem to have contributed to noticeably drier skin. Without lipstick, my lips are drier. I barely recognize my eyes and eyebrows without makeup, because I used to wear eye makeup almost every day. There is an advantage to wearing a mask because you don’t have to wear makeup or lipstick. You can concentrate on your eyes if you want and leave it at that. I think I have saved hundreds of dollars by not buying any new makeup!
This article lays out all the ways the pandemic has affected women of our age and our use of makeup. Some of their ideas include using chapstick instead of lipstick so you don’t mess up your mask; various ways to make sparse eyebrows look better, wear earrings instead of makeup to feel “dressed up.” The article doesn’t talk about moisturizers, which seem to be even more needed than ever.
Perhaps a more important question to ask is “why do we care about makeup?” Why does it matter how we look as we get older? What are we trying to prove? Makeup doesn’t hide aging and sometimes makes a person look even older if the makeup is too heavy. We aren’t fooling anyone if we put on extra foundation or try to accentuate our eyes in a way that looks overdone. Are we using makeup to impress someone else or is it because we have come to like the way we look with makeup? Mask wearing has accentuated issues around self-concept, and yet we haven’t addressed it much.
One thing I have learned about masks is that they make it harder to hear and to figure out another person’s reactions. When you cover the bottom 2/3 of your face, you don’t get the full smile. The eyes may tell almost everything, but unless you look carefully, you are missing someone else’s true reactions. It also has surprised me how much more difficult it is to understand someone when you can’t see their mouth as they speak. Masks may make it more difficult to participate in conversations, because before the pandemic you probably relied more on lip reading than you even realized. If you wear hearing aids and glasses, adding a mask can make it difficult to keep your hearing aids from falling out. It helps to tap your ears occasionally to be sure they are still there, and even bring your hearing aids to dinner in a little container so if you take off your mask to eat, you can put your aids back on your ears and hear what’s being said!
Although some don’t realize how effective masks can be to protect you from Covid-19, it doesn’t take much research to find out why masks help keep you safe, even though many mask requirements have been relaxed recently. The CDC site provides all the scientific evidence you would need to persuade you that wearing a mask is one of the most effective actions (other than vaccinations) you can take to keep from getting Covid-19. What seems to baffle me is people who don’t keep the mask over their noses! What is the point of wearing a mask to avoid inhaling droplets of Covid if you don’t keep it away from your nose? Where do people think the Covid droplets are entering your body? Your nose!! And taking your mask down to talk is even worse, especially if others are talking with their masks down. Despite the newest guidelines about Covid, the CDC still recommends wearing a mask in indoor spaces, especially in crowds. If you are going to wear a mask, don’t wear the blue surgical type or the one with cute figures on it –they are barely worth the trouble. A KN95 mask is the best type of mask to wear. This Mayo Clinic website explains how the different types of masks work.
Until the death rate of Covid-19 comes down to that of regular flu, keeping up your vaccination status and wearing a mask is the best thing you can do to survive and thrive. No matter how mild Covid-19 symptoms may be for some people, the long term effects of this virus are still unknown. So deal with the cosmetic effects and the inconvenience!