We Need to Talk About the Absolutely Awful Stink of the Face Mask
Adeline loves food, lots of it and often, both at home and out and about. Usually that goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. In the series Sunday Roast, she shares her observations. This week about the stink and the face mask.
The face mask is a reliable conversation starter. Beginning with what you call it, which can range from mask to cover to cloth. Then there’s team disposable (wasteful but hygienic) and team reusable (sustainable but disgusting if you don’t wash it at boiling temperatures).
Besides constantly putting it on, taking it off again and gasping for air in between, a face mask can actually be quite handy. It masks an unmade-up face, lets you move through shops incognito and means no one can see if you have something stuck between your teeth. But the stink and the smell, people—that beats everything.
A Garlic Coup de Grâce
You should know that I have a weakness for anything that might possibly contain garlic. A hearty tzatziki that’s roughly fifty-fifty garlic and yogurt, or an aubergine that has been simmering side by side with the famous cloves. So it can happen that you absent-mindedly consume mountains of garlic without considering that you’ll then have to spend a long time with a face mask over your nose. Presumably mandatory, because no one would do that voluntarily.
The stink, people, the stink—it’s indescribable. As if you’re being clubbed down by your own breath. A kind of garlic coup de grâce, battered up through your mouth into your nose until it becomes a smell-stink explosion in your head.
The Farmer of All Farmers
I also have the feeling that a situation bordering on disaster is unfolding inside that cover, after which the disaster escapes—which is especially precarious. It seeps out. Making you think that every exhalation produces a powerful stream of garlic, which you blast through the open sides of the face mask at the person behind you.
And I haven’t even mentioned the human belch, which in a face mask smells and feels like the farmer of all farmers, with a garlic blast of truly epic proportions. It’s also quite an art not to secretly lose consciousness when, for what feels like a full hour, you’re reusing your own garlic breath. For-f***’s-sake. The stink.
In Tears
Eventually you reach the point where you have to get rid of that stink, and in desperation you take a piece of chewing gum. Anyone who has ever chewed gum in combination with a face-mask-cover-cloth knows that this is the grande blamage. With the first chew, you breathe the menthol deeply into your lungs in relief, only to blast it into your face mask afterward.
And suddenly it turns out that you’re not only producing two powerful air currents on either side, but also have leakage at the top of the mask, after which it feels as though menthol is being spat into your eyes. By yourself. In the end, the menthol still proves unable to mask the stink, after which it mixes with it and you end up in tears because of your own breath.
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