How To Keep Snorkel Masks From Fogging Up

Hi! I'm Howard Payne. I'm an instructor with Dive Wimbledon. We're a 5-star IDC center here in Southwest London.

And I teach both recreational and technical diving, and I've been diving for about eight years. And today, I'm going to give you a little bit of advice on equipment and how to scuba dive. In the next presentation, we're going to show you how to stop your snorkelling mask from misting up or fogging up when you're underwater.

These are my Scubapro mask; you can see two different styles here. This one is a single glass pane, where this one is two panes of glass. And I guess it's just a personal preference thing; really kind of what fits your face.

Something is very important is to choose a mask that's got a very low internal volume. So, hardly any air space inside because when you're trying to clear the water out of it, that's going to make it much easier for you to clear it. Okay? When masks first come from the factory, when they're manufacturing them, they put a coating on the glass to stop stuff from sticking to it when it's being manufactured.

So before you first use it, before you take it diving, what you need to do is make sure that you've removed all of that coating from the inside. What we do here at Dive Wimbledon is normally we use a very cheap chalky toothpaste and we rub that for about five or ten minutes with your finger over the inside of the mask. And the acts are very mild, abrasive, and it just cleans all of these coating that they used in the manufacturing process of the glass.

What I also then do, just to make sure, is I normally use a lighter on the inside of the glass and that just burns any last traces of the glass itself. You got to be very careful with that; you don't damage the silicone skirt while you're doing it so just very very gently. Once it's cleared, obviously most people are kind of aware that you need to, what you'll commonly hear people talking about, is spitting in mask to stop them from misting up under water.

The issue is that if there's any dirt on the surface or grease on the surface of mask, then you'll find that condensation sticks to that very easily. So typically, what we do is we use spit. That works much better on a dry mask than it does on a wet mask, so bear that in mind.

Also bear in mind, if you're on holiday somewhere nice in a hot country, typically you'll have quite lot of suntan cream on your face. Just wipe that off before you go diving and reapply it when you get out of the water; because if you get a lot of grease washing off your face inside the mask, that's really going to give the condensation something to stick to. Something that I used quite a lot is anti-fog gel.

What anti-fog gel does is it, two things, it first cleans the inside of the mask so it gets rid of any dirt or grease that could stick to and it's also what they call as a factant. That's to say it disperses water droplets and stops the condensation from actually forming. Spit does pretty much the same thing.

You got to be a little bit careful, particularly maybe if you're going diving off the lunch and you spit in your mask; if there's any dirt or grease or trace of anything in your spit, then that may just be making the situation worse rather than better. So, I've actually found that either some anti-fog gel or some people say you use a mixture of half water and half baby shampoo in a little bottle, which they find very effective. Just rub that in the mask before you go diving and then rinse it out and put it on.

So, a few things to think off there. .