I’m the current situation where people is complaining about wearing a face mask because they cannot breathe, I want to highlight that we are losing more than our breath. We are losing our face.
An exercise
I have found these two examples of people wearing and not wearing face masks.
For people not used to see others wearing masks, the first one is disturbing. I still remember comments at the beginning of COVID19 from people saying that people wearing masks give them chills. That’s fair because almost everyone was used to see face masks only at hospitals and being in a hospital is usually a bad thing. So apart from feeling disturbed or unconformable with the first picture. can you tell something about how the people in the picture are feeling? If you pay attention, the only things that you can look at are the eyes and the direction of the head. For me, most of the people in that image look sad, but probably they are just walking home thinking on their things with no special sadness.
Looking at the second picture, it is much easier to tell how the people is feeling. From the left, you see a guy that looks in a hurry or other talking to the phone and looks like arguing something. But what happens if we remove the mouths and noses with GIMP? I recommend you to do the following exercise:
- Look at someone in the picture bellow
- try to guess their real face
- Go back to the original picture and see how close you are
TIP: Open the image in two different tabs from the browser and switch from one to another.
When I did this exercise, I found that even though I have been manually removing the faces from the people, it was still hard for me to correctly imagine the face bellow the mask.
My personal experience
I remember the first time I noticed this. I was buying in the supermarket and the everyday cashier was attending me. For some reason, he looked sad. This is weird because he usually is really happy. Then he asked me if I wanted the ticket with the same happy voice as always. Then I realized that he was not sad, It was my imagination, for some reason, I saw a sad face instead of the face mask. When I heard the happy voice, something clicked in my interpretation of his face and he didn’t look sad anymore.
I had similar experiences during the last days, but my theory is that my brain is constantly trying to come up with a facial expression to replace the face mask. And the bad news is that it is not accurate.
There is a clear change in how my brain tends to imagine facial expressions depending on the kind of face maks. Here are some example feelings
- Typical surgeon white/blue/green: sad, worry
- Big FFPN: Fear, distress
- Fabric colorful or patterns: curiosity, intrigue
- Fabric white/blue/green: same as a surgeon
- Fabric black: formality, seriousness
I found my self having a hard time because I replied with a smile to someone but suddenly realizing that I’m wearing a face mask. This made me instinctively move my eyes with more effort and to pull my smile to the limit so the other person can see my facial expression. After moments like this and identifying how masks made me feel, I bought fabric face masks not only to reuse them but to ensure others imagine me with the face I want to show.
An experiment
At the time of writing, I came up with an experiment. What if we draw a smile on our face masks? I think that this can have a stunning effect. Just imagine a group of people with smiles on their faces.
I wonder the physiological impact of not being able to see other people’s facial expressions. This picture definitely triggers the uncanny valley sensation if I draw smiles. But in the other hand… it looks happy.
My advice
I think it is time to put a little bit more awareness to our body expression and try to consciously increase the feeling that we want to transmit and that otherwise, we will be showing without a face. Or maybe ensure that you put some noise into your smiles.
Another advice is not to wear sunglasses. If you combine sunglasses with face masks it is virtually impossible to tell the facial expression. This can make it very difficult to have a conversation with you. So if you are going to order something on the beach, remove your sunglasses to help the cashier to feel a little bit more comfortable.
Talking about cashiers, I think they should wear transparent face shields. This gives great protection for them and allows customers to see their facial expressions.
Conclusions
In this situation, a virtual meeting can feel more natural that one where everyone is standing 3 meters apart and wearing face masks. Also, meetings where there is only audio, it is really hard to know how the participants are. This can be a problem if you are trying to explain something and you don’t know if the other person is understanding it. My advice, make noises of assertion! (hmm, yeah, nice!, I got it) or even better, ask questions.
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