Glasses Always Fog Up With Your Mask On? Try This TikTok Hack

You've emerged from your 70th Zoom meeting of the day, blinking and stepping into the sun. But just when you've escaped the Zoom glare in your glasses, you mask up and enter a different kind of glare — the moist kind. Navigating how to keep your glasses from fogging up while wearing a mask has become one of the many weird nuances of day-to-day pandemic life.

If your mask isn't fitting you snugly in the right places, all that steamy condensation from your breath has nowhere to go but up — and right onto your glasses. You might have cycled through mask after mask, trying to find one that will naturally avoid that uncomfortable steaminess obscuring your field of vision. To prevent this abomination, you've realized that you need to make some serious adjustments to your mask game.

Enter Maria Louise Agbaegbu, a chef and mom from the UK, whose TikTok has the ultimate hack to prevent face mask glasses fog. But even if you've got a mask that fits you very well, adding glasses to the equation can be a nightmare — Agbaegbu's TikTok fixes that. (She tells her viewers that learned about this mask hack on Facebook, but she's the one bringing the hack to life on your phone.)

After washing your hands to make sure you're not contaminating your mask, this vid recommends following these simple steps to eliminate foggy glasses:

• Fold the mask once, horizontally (in the same direction as your lips).
• Tie a knot in both of your mask's ear loops, keeping the knots as close as possible to the edges of the mask itself.
• Unfold the mask and adjust it to make a groove for your nose (this step works especially well with masks that have stiffer edges).
• Turn the corners that you made when you tied your ear loop knots inside out, so they're poking in the opposite direction than they originally were.
• Put your mask on and shape it to your nose once again.
• Put on your glasses over the spot where the top of the mask rests on your face.
• Inhale, exhale, and enjoy not fogging up.

This hack isn't just good for preventing your glasses from becoming an early Southern California morning (AKA disturbingly foggy). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tying and cinching the edges of your mask can reduce exposure to infectious particles by 95%, for you as well as mask-wearing folks around you. It's great for your health and for your glasses — and that qualifies as excellent news during the pandemic.