Mask idea?

[Imgonnasneeze]

Where I live masks are still required indoors for the most part, and also it’s allergy season. A bunch of people I know have allergies and I don’t and they say I don’t know the suffering that they are in. Probably a dumb idea but what if I put some pepper or something in my mask so I could sort of experience it with them? Any input?

[SleepingPhlox]

Hey, dumb ideas make life fun and I always think if you feel like doing it and it's not going to hurt anyone, why not?

But, like, loading up a mask with an irritant has the potential to have a lot of downside.  Breathing a lot of particles into your mouth will bring them into your lungs, which is very, very bad news.

Maybe there is a safer way you could get the experience?  I've never used chhinkni but people swear by it.  Could be a place to start for a safer inducing experience?

[Chanel_no5]

Um... actually... a bunch of surgeons did this as an experiment to figure out what the safest way was if a surgeon needs to sneeze during surgery. They did put pepper in their surgical masks and checked if and where anything came out out the mask when they sneezed.  

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nothing-to-sneeze-at/

(spoiler: the safest way is to just sneeze right forward, not attempt to turn away or anything. Because if anything does come out of the mask, it lands on the surgeon's chest, not on the patient. This experiment has been done a couple of times by different surgeons, so I guess it's reliable. I maaaaay have stumbled over that article by accident when I was writing a fic.  (no, my lovely doctor didn't go anywhere near an OR with her cold, but she did wear a mask, and she did have to sneeze wearing it, and I wanted to know what the protocol drilled into her would have been.  Not that she followed it completely outside. But anyway.)

But yeah, I mean, if medical professionals - albeit in the name of science - has done it, it can't be that risky. Don't fill the mask with pepper though. Just rub some into the inside or something. Or sniff it before you put the mask on.

Or, you know, don't do it at all. It doesn't seem very pleasant.