WTF - Korean Air Masks - Eat Your Kimchi

COMMENTS 51

It’s yellow dust season now and the air is heavy in Korea, so we’re doing a video on Korean air masks. We’re starting to use them now. If you don’t know about Yellow Dust season, it’s one of our least favorite parts of the year. Supposedly, sand from deserts in China annually blow down to South Korea and make the air terrible to breath. Your eyes burn and your throat itches. And the stuff is everywhere. We left our clothes to dry overnight by the window, and our black shirts had lots of yellow dust all over them by the morning. Uggghh. It also supposedly clogs your engines, but we haven’t had that issue with our scooter. We’re just coughing and sneezing a lot more. Gross!

Anyhow, to combat the nastiness of the air, people in Korea often wear air masks. We were quite taken aback when we saw them at first, because we usually just associate them with doctors and surgery. We’re not used to seeing them worn out in public like this. Let’s face it: they’re not really the coolest things you can wear. They look kinda creepy. To combat the weirdness of air masks, you can make them look cute! Oh boy! You can wear the hamster that we displayed here (or what Martina likes to call the Gamster: hamster + gangster), or you can have a Hello Kitty one, or a Thomas the Tank Engine. Why Thomas the Tank Engine? We don’t know. Supposedly he’s quite popular here.

A more pressing question is this: are these things effective or not? Any doctors here? We imagine that surgeons wear these masks so they don’t spit on you by accident when you’re cut open on their table, but for day-to-day use, how effective are these in preventing you from either a) getting sick or b) breathing in pollution. Anyone? We’re quite curious about this. Yeah!

Also, don’t forget that we’re starting our new segment tomorrow: TL;DR Thursdays, where we answer your top rated questions in video format. You’ve got a few more hours to vote until we start recording. We’re surprised at how fun the questions are so far. Hooray!