Custom Face Masks: The Only Accessory We Care About Now

Face masks are truly the must-have accessory of the season, and we’ve noticed that a lot of you are making custom ones that express your personality and resolve. We want to give you a chance to show them off and win something for your creativity and spirit.

Post a photo of yourself on Facebook or Instagram in one of your masks (or any other face covering) with the hashtags #ShowUsYourMask and #NextTribe. (Or post more than one if you have several masks.) At the end of the month we’ll choose winners and honorable mentions to receive free products from one of our favorite brands, Pause Well Aging a skincare line for the special needs we have during menopause. We’re giving away three of the Well-Aging Collection, with all you’ll need for better skin, and two Discovery Kits, with travel sized products.

Since we have to wear masks anyhow, let’s make it as fun and social as possible.

Making Your Own

Emily Vickers is making her own designs for friends, asking them in exchange to donate to a cause that helps frontline workers.

You’ll find many articles and tutorials online that will show you ways to make your own mask. This one from CNN has instructions for those who sew and those who don’t, which is nice.

The national fabric store chain Joann is encouraging its crafty customers to make masks to donate to health care workers, under a Make to Give effort. The goal is to make 100 million masks, and at the time of this posting, Joann partners and customers were almost halfway there. The website is very much worth looking at because you’ll find several tutorials, plus patterns and ideas for different designs.

Many people are making smaller efforts. Emily Vickers from Hopewell, NJ, has designed her own styles and when she posted them on Facebook, offering them for free in exchange for a promise to donate to a cause helping frontline workers (such as Mask For Docs or Operation Masks), she was inundated with requests.

“Each one is unique because that’s the only way I won’t get bored making one after another,” she explains. Emily has had the black and gold batik fabric pictured above for years. “My mother in law was given it when she and her husband were in Kenya over 55 years ago!” she says. “The material is perfect and the artwork is fantastic. I hesitated for a moment to cut the fabric up, but then I thought, THIS is what the fabric should be used for rather than hanging behind a door in my office, unseen.”

Read More: 11 Ways to Get Through a Pandemic with Your Sanity Intact

Buying a Custom Mask

This is a clever mask sold on Etsy, but the message is a little dire and scary right now. Don’t you think?

The makers on Etsy have quickly shifted gear from knitted baby cardigans and cutting boards in the shape of sandwich bread to the most in-demand product now. There’s a whole selection of custom and clever masks, including leopard print masks and ones with the logo of your favorite sports team. We love the masks that feature a very appropriate message for these times: “If you can read this, you’re standing too close.” But these are our two favorites: A mask with ferocious animal teeth and one with an image of a closed zipper over the mouth.

Even fashion companies have gotten in the game. Urban Outfitter’s Rolling Stone logo mask is sold out, for instance. Companies that normally make customized T-shirts, coffee mugs, and the like are also jumping into the custom face mask business. Zazzle, known for business cards and graduation announcements, has more than 600 face mask varieties, from those as beautiful as any scarf you’d wear around your neck to ones with inspiring sayings. We like anything animal oriented. You can order masks with your own logo here. If you want to print a photo on your mask, you can find that here. We like the idea of getting Angelina Jolie’s mouth printed on ours!

A favorite mask from Zazzle.

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