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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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My personal observation is that almost everyone I still see wearing a mask in public transport or while shopping is a senior citizen or a middle-aged person that seems obviously sickly.

I wonder how many of those people are like my husband, who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances. He gets bad sinus headaches that last for days from artificial fragrances and he is very happy that now he has a normalized excuse for wearing a mask in public.

who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances.

The typical mask cannot block these. If you're not smelling them because you are wearing a mask, that's either because you are rebreathing your own exhaled air (bad) or mouthbreathing due to added mechanical difficulty of pushing air past the mask (also bad). On the rare occasions I have worn a mask, it is indeed the latter that happened. I noticed I couldn't smell things, and then noticed the reason why is that I started breathing through my mouth.

Why is breathing through your mouth supposed to be bad? TBH that's just how I have breathed my entire life, I have never been able to get proper air flow through my nose.

Your nose has filters to remove (some of) the particulate matter in incoming air before it gets to your lungs. This is then ejected in snot - if you spend enough time in a polluted environment your snot will be black.

Interesting. Kind of a shame my nose has never really let me breathe properly, then.

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