Do THIS to Prevent Mask Fogging on EVERY Dive

Has this ever happened to you? A foggy mask can be a huge annoyance on any dive and if you don't prep your mask properly, you're going to get so frustrated that it'll ruin your dive trying to keep that fog clear. In this video, I'll teach you how to prevent your mask from fogging by first prepping it properly from the manufacturer and then maintaining it before each and every dive. Let's get into it. I'm Thomas Hughes, a professional scuba instructor, and on this channel you'll see Mask fog can seriously be a pain. Yes, you can always let a little bit of water into your mask and swish it around to clear the fog temporarily while you're scuba diving or snorkeling, but the key thing to remember is that is only temporary. And let's face it, you really don't want to have to do that over and over again every few minutes while you're diving. Luckily, there are two things you can do now to prevent this from ever happening to you again. Prepping your mask properly and using defog. And the best thing is if you're sitting in a resort right now with a new scuba mask and you haven't prepped it properly, you have everything you need with you to get this done so you don't have to fret about that. So the first thing we're going to do is prep our mask. And if you didn't know this, when you buy a mask brand new, the manufacturer actually puts a bit of a film or material on top of the lens itself that prevents it from getting scratched or damaged while in transit and shipping to the store or from Amazon or wherever you bought that at. If you have forgotten about it by the time you actually got around to either getting home or using your mask and you're wondering why the defog that you bought isn't working or you're just getting constant hot spots of foggy areas all over your mask, it's probably because you didn't prep it properly or you didn't prep it well enough. There's actually three well-known techniques for prepping your mask and I'll go in and go in order of kind of the safest and easiest to do to the ones that are either a little bit more harder to do, maybe potentially could damage the mask, or are just expensive and a little bit unneeded to be honest. The first of these methods is actually going to be using a tube of toothpaste. So I have with me some Crest 3D White, but really any type of toothpaste will work. And the grainier the toothpaste is, the better because you want it to have a little bit of a scrub to the lens to be able to help remove that film. So what we'll be doing is we'll be taking about a pea-sized drop of toothpaste and we're going to put one pea on each side of the mask, both the left side and right side of the lens. So if you have a split mask, you can put one drop on each side, or if you have a single frame mask, just kind of spread it around to where you have a drop on the left and a drop on the right. And you're going to take your finger and just kind of work that toothpaste against the lens and get it in all the crevices along the edges, all across the side of the lens, and we're just going to scrub with our finger. We don't need to go super rough, but we do want to do this for quite a while. And again, the granular toothpaste actually works a little bit better for this as we work through the mask and kind of cover the lens completely. So using the power of YouTube, you can see that I've covered the entire lens now and have worked it for quite a few minutes here. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to rinse the mask completely to get rid of all the toothpaste in here and just kind of, again, use our finger to massage the lens a little bit, get that toothpaste up and lifted from the lens itself. And then we're going to go ahead and make sure our mask dries and test it out. After your mask is dry, you're going to want to hold it up to your face and just kind of breathe a little bit of hot air, just into the mask lens itself and look for hot spots or just foggy spots in the mask itself. If you missed any areas, you'll see a little bit of fog show up still, but overall, if the mask has been scrubbed properly, there shouldn't be any fog that you see there at all. There's still going to be one more step we'll have to do next, but this is actually a great way to just defog your mask in a pinch when you don't have any commercial grade tools with you or the other methods that I said are a little bit more dangerous it'll go into for a minute. Now, if you do see fog there still, you can either try one of these other methods or just put some toothpaste on there again, scrub harder and longer, go ahead and try that out one or two more times and see if you can get rid of the fog that way. For me personally, with my Hollis M1 mask, which is my current primary mask, I had to scrub it two or three times and then I've never had a problem again. The next method you can use, believe it or not, would be to use a lighter. Now, I'd recommend a lighter that has that stick on the end instead so you get a little bit more length and reach away and better control than just maybe a Bic lighter, but what you're actually going to do is you will literally burn the film that's on the lens off of the mask itself. So you take your lighter, you light it, and you're actually going to get close to the lens and you're going to burn inside of here. This can damage the mask. You don't want to hold it in one spot too long because you might leave a burn spot on the lens itself. You also want to stay away from the skirt because you don't want to burn through the skirt and cause a hole in your mask. I personally have used this method before. It works really, really well, but again, I find it a little bit dangerous and when I bought more expensive masks, I didn't really feel comfortable putting a flame to it. I don't think the manufacturers recommend it either, so I'm not going to demonstrate it on my mask today, but you can go ahead and look on YouTube and find people doing the burn method if you are interested in that. But again, if you're in a pinch and you really need to burn off that film, you can do it that way instead of using toothpaste or a commercial grade product. And finally, the last option is to use something from a commercial company such as Gear Aid Seabuff. Seabuff is something that I've used personally to clean my mask and help remove the film when I first bought my very first scuba mask, and it does work. It's just a little bit expensive for what you get, and I don't think it lasts as long or is as cheap as, say, a tube of toothpaste would be. But a tube of toothpaste has worked just as well, if not better for me as well. Something like Seabuff from Gear Aid, I'll go ahead and leave in the description down below, and that way you can pick it up if you'd like to. And it is a really good commercial product. I'm just trying to recommend something a little bit cheaper for you so you don't have to spend even more money, and it's still safe. Again, toothpaste isn't going to hurt the lens at all. It won't scratch the lens as long as you're not scrubbing like crazy with a sponge or something like that. Don't use like a wire brush or anything like that. Just your finger and a little bit of toothpaste will work fine. If you do use Seabuff, it's actually the same process. You take about a pea-sized drop, put it on each side of the lens, coat the lens fully by using your finger to just smear it in all those areas, rinse it well, and then go ahead and test it out for fog and reapply more if you need to. This is why I'm saying that the commercial product works great, but it's really similar to toothpaste, and in my opinion, I would just use toothpaste instead. Regardless of method that you use, even the burning one, make sure you rinse the mask very well afterwards. You want to get all of that material off that you put on the lens. Prepping your mask is pretty much a one-and-done type thing, and you know, after a year or two, you might want to go ahead and reapply some toothpaste or that commercial cleaner, or I guess maybe re-burn it if you want to go ahead and do that, just to kind of keep the mask clean and make sure you have a nice clean surface for your defog to attach to. But defog is the next thing you're going to want to do, and before every dive, I recommend applying just a little bit of defog. You have a few different options to pick from that I'll go over, but one thing I want to say is that some of the products out there will claim that the defog is good for, you know, two, three, four, five dives in a row. I just recommend always adding a little bit more. It's not that expensive overall if you go with a commercial product, and if you do a DIY solution, it's even cheaper, and I just can't recommend enough just adding that little bit of defog because you do not want to have a foggy mask while diving. It's the worst. It is one of the most annoying things, and being task-loaded by constantly clearing your mask by adding water, clearing it out so you can wash off the fog, it just isn't a safe thing to do. It makes you miss things on the dive, and it's just not an enjoyable experience. So let's talk defog solutions. Well, first of all, there's a free option that all of us have with us at all times, and what is it? It is your spit or saliva. So believe it or not, some people will either lick their mask lens or literally spit into their mask and rub that spit on the lenses, and for whatever reason, something about our saliva will actually prevent the mask from fogging. This does work. It works really well, actually, surprisingly. However, I do want to caution you that I have seen a couple people come back and say that they've gotten eye infections from spitting in their mask, or their doctor said it was likely from spitting in their mask. Maybe something else was going on at the same time, but in my opinion, once I heard that, I no longer wanted to spit in my mask. So I make sure that I always have some sort of other solution with me that I'll talk about next. The next thing you can use, it's actually a little bit of baby shampoo, and you might want to dilute it a little bit with some water as well. There's not an exact science here, but basically the fragrance-free no tears baby shampoo will actually work super well as both a cleaner for your mask as well as a defog solution. You definitely need to apply it before every dive. It won't last multiple dives or anything like that, but often you'll see on dive boats that they just have baby shampoo in a spray bottle with a bunch of water. So think about how much water you add to make it more liquid form so you can spray it out like that. You just douse your mask in it real quick, rinse it off, don't touch the lens after you've done this, and you're good to go. You have defog. I've seen people make up a solution before they go on a trip or they bring baby shampoo with them, and because you don't need very much baby shampoo and you just add a bunch of water to dilute it down anyway, it is a very, very, very cheap DIY solution that works super well. And if you want any recipes for this, leave a comment down below and I'll point out to some different videos that I've seen that have either DIY solutions or just blog articles that talk about some different recipes for DIY defog as well. Now the last option we have would be a commercial defog solution, and when I say commercial defog, it's not super expensive and it lasts a long time, and this is actually what I prefer to go with. So my favorite brand is actually Stream 2 C. They make a whole bunch of reef safe products like sunscreen and shampoos and things like that, and they also make a defog solution that works really well. Gear Aid also makes one that is a great defog solution, and there's one called PSI 3000 or something like that too that I've seen used. It's more of a gel type of solution, but at the end of the day, all of these commercial products work very, very well in my opinion, and they all get applied the same way that you would the baby shampoo. So with the baby shampoo, you might have a spray bottle where it's very liquid. If you don't, then you're just going to take a very small amount and smear it on your lenses and rinse it out afterwards, and with the commercial defog, it's about the same. You're going to take very, very, very little amount. You don't need much at all. A little bit goes a long way. About the size of a pea, maybe slightly smaller. You're going to put just a little bit on your finger, and then you're going to smear it all around your lenses and just kind of coat the inside of your lenses with that defog, similar to what we did with the toothpaste or with the commercial cleaning product when we're talking about removing the film. Once your lenses are completely coated, you can actually just leave it there for maybe 30 seconds or so, and this is the same thing with the defog if you use the baby shampoo, for example, and then you're going to want to go ahead and rinse it thoroughly. So most boats will have some type of rinse bucket, or if you're at a dive shop and you're going off the dock, you might have a rinse bucket there, or you just get in the water and then swish it around in the salt water a bit or in the fresh water if you're in a lake or a river. Clear out the mask, get all that solution off of the inside of the lens, and then you can go ahead and put your mask on and just don't touch the inside of your lens at all. So again, whether it's a commercial solution, saliva, which again I don't recommend, or a baby shampoo, you want to put that on, rinse it, and then don't touch it because the oils in your finger will actually take that solution back off the lens again, and it'll cause your mask to fog up while you're diving. So keep that in mind. Now that the fog issue's fixed, you might find that the mask is actually a little bit uncomfortable or causing some pain or squeezing on the bridge of your nose or around your eyes or cheeks, for example. Maybe you're having those red spots around your face after you've been diving for an hour or two. Well, that's where you want to make sure you have the proper fit of your mask, and in this video I talk all about finding the proper mask for you. Click or tap the screen now to check that out, and with that, stay safe, have fun, and let's go diving.