your mask doesn t have to hide your smile featured image

Your Mask Doesn’t Have to Hide Your Smile

Finally it feels like the end of the pandemic is within sight! Three separate vaccines are being rolled out in the US, and spring is in the air. In the meantime, though, you gotta keep masking up.

Sometimes masks can feel impersonal--it’s hard to connect to someone if you can see only their eyes. That’s a problem Danielle Baskin, CEO of Maskalike (@selfiemasks) is trying to solve. At Maskalike’s website you upload a photo, they use “image warping software” to fit it to a piece of curved fabric, and voila! You have a personalized face mask with a picture of your smile (or your grimace, or your cat, or Nicholas Cage, if you prefer) within a few days.

The mask shown here is a selfie-picture ordered by actress, comedian and author Kym Whitley (@Kym Whitley).

Apparently the masks can be used to unlock some phones (though you have to store your masked self as its own profile). Whoah, that opens a whole Pandora’s Box of privacy, security, safety, and ethics questions we’ll need to deal with in the near future as facial recognition software and the ability to reproduce likenesses of people become more commonplace.

Those thorny issues aside for now, gut check. Is this product cool? Creepy? Funny? Would you wear it?

Leave a comment

All comments are moderated before being published.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Continue Reading

Health Benefits of Being Kind

Health Benefits of Being Kind

November 13th is World Kindness Day, making it the perfect time to extend care to people in your life–including yourself. You may have heard that being kind benefits not only the recipient of posit...
Self Care Awareness Month Activities to Try

Self Care Awareness Month Activities to Try

September has been deemed National Self Care Awareness Month, meaning it's a great time to reflect on your current habits and to set some new goals related to your physical and mental health. In fa...
Benefits of Biophilic Design

Benefits of Biophilic Design

Have you ever worked in or visited a space that put your mind at ease? Perhaps the walls were painted a soothing color such as light-blue, plants livened up the space, and there was plenty of natur...
Elevate Your Summer Self Care

Elevate Your Summer Self Care

Ask a group of people which season is their favorite and many are sure to answer that it's summer. With the longer days (especially around the summer solstice!), outdoor weather, and long break fro...