This Face Mask "Bracket" Is a Must For Any Teacher Going Back to School This Fall

By Kate Schweitzer
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Wearing a mask is one thing, but having to talk with one over your mouth for eight hours a day as a teacher is quite another.

If you've tried it for even just a few minutes, you can instantly rattle off the annoyances. The fabric either rides up your chin or down your nose. The mask gets sucked into your mouth any time you take a breath. You have to repeat yourself because the sound is so muffled.

But Angie Madden, a teacher with a bit of an Amazon shopping habit, discovered a simple solution that will make mask-wearing far less frustrating.

It's called a face mask "bracket," and it's essentially a three-dimensional silicone support frame that rests around your mouth and sits between your face and your mask of choice. Angie found her 3D Mask Bracket ($11) on Amazon in a pack of five. That's just a little more than $2 each!

"When you wear it, it keeps your mask off your face, so you can hear me clearly and I'm not breathing my mask in and my mask doesn't move off my face, and it's really, really cool," she said in a Facebook video after demonstrating how to put it on. "I wore it all day, I didn't have any issues, I wasn't taking it off."

She admitted that it "looks really weird," but recommended the "amazing" find to all her teacher friends, and according to the manufacturer, they can be used by children, too. Considering it's already gotten 22,000 likes, it seems educators — or anyone having to spend full days wearing masks — are taking her word for it.