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Actually have masks in stock for more than a few minutes for once this year, guess it's time to talk about them. And by them I mean masks in general https://outlier.nyc/collections/objects/products/mask-1-ultrasuede-snaptight
First off, while I designed, manufacture and sell cloth masks, truth is 80% of the time I wear medical masks. I prefer Barrière ( https://www.mybarriere.com ) but pretty much any medically certified mask is a great option.
Full disclosure on Barrière, my girlfriend is a co-founder so I'm biased, but they really are better at the small details than other medical masks. Big picture wise though medical masks are all tested and certified to common standards so they perform quite similarly.
We still make cloth masks for a few reasons, they were needed back in the spring when we designed them, there are interesting design challenges to them, they sell well, and they aren't disposable.
But one of the first things we realized designing them is that cloth masks are the wild west, there are ZERO standards to them and not that many guidelines either. The best cloth masks perform close to the level of medical masks but most are far worse, some do almost nothing
The early scientific studies on them were laughable from a fabric standpoint, the way fabric was specified was about as unscientific as you could get. The first paper I saw with fabric weight included was published in October! ( https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02786826.2020.1817846 )
The closest to usable numbers was thread count, a completely gamified number used to sell sheets. I've never once seen it used to sell fabric because it tells you almost nothing. To be useful you need to know the threads per inch in both the warp and weft and also the yarn size
That aside, if you dig into the various studies of cloth masks you'll find the ones that work the best involve 3 to 5 layers of fabric. There was at least decent info on the fiber content, cotton and poly work best, but 3 to 5 layers of cotton and poly is a lot!
The cloth masks that work the best are heavy, thick and often involve cotton, a fabric that loves to suck up moisture and stay wet.
I'm still convinced that a lot of the hate of masks comes from people wearing poorly made cotton masks, wearing a mask that's keeping all the moisture from your breath on you face is no fun... But who knows, the mask hate is pretty irrational
Medical and N95 masks are made from a very different type of material they are always what's known as nonwoven, and almost always are polypropylene or PP. One of the main properties of PP is that it absorbs *zero* moisture, almost the opposite of cotton
Nonwovens are a category that includes felt, it's made by randomly interlocking huge amounts of small fibers. If you look at it under a microscope it's very different than knit or woven cloth which have repeating patterns and lots of holes
Knits and wovens are basically made by taking 1D objects (a yarn) and locking them them together to create a 2D object (a fabric). Nonwovens on the surface are as 2D as other fabrics, but zoomed in they are actually much 3D, which is why they make better filters
We made a few masks with woven and knit fabric back in the spring but we ultimately focused on one of the few "luxury" nonwovens out there, Ultrasuede.
Ultrasuede is made with ultra-microfiber polyester staples that are needle punched and bonded together to create an incredibly soft fabric that happens to filter exceptionally well. Polyester also absorbs almost no water so it stays dry
It makes a really nice feeling mask, not clammy, soft to the touch and as best we can tell from our own testing and talking the manufacturer it filters extremely well. But there are no standards for cloth masks...
It is lighter than a mask made with 3-5 layers of cotton & poly (at weights and structures that actually will filter at least) but it is also significantly heavier than a meltblown nonwoven polypropylene medical mask
the real advantage is mostly that you can wash and reuse it. Washing and drying burns quite a bit of carbon so this is not necessarily as eco as it sounds, but it feels nice. It also means we can use much more expensive attachments than disposable masks can...
All in all it's pretty nice, it dons and doffs with easy, feels great on the skin and as best we can tell filters extremely well. https://outlier.nyc/collections/objects/products/mask-1-ultrasuede-snaptight
All that said I still prefer medical masks. They are standardized, tested and certified. And they use the absolutely best filtering material for the job meltblown nonwoven polypropylene
Meltblown nonwoven polypropylene is superlight weight, super breathable and filters on multiple levels. This NYT graphic specifies N95 but medical masks work the same way, the difference between a regular medical and N95 is in how it seals. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/30/science/wear-mask-covid-particles-ul.html
More than anything it's the light weight combined with the zero moisture absorption that makes these so much better. Back in the spring cloth masks were recommended because there were medical mask shortages. Those have subsided, life is better in a lighter drier mask...
