This week’s (way too real and absolutely terrifying) sign of the apocalypse comes to us from Vox, which has a story about companies that are attempting to capitalize on the planet’s ever-diminishing air quality by designing and selling air-filtration masks made “for both fashion and function.”
“The global future of air quality doesn’t look so good. As humanity continues to make little progress fighting climate change, fires are expected to get more frequent,” Vox said. “Enter the face mask, an accessory ripe for the market in these dystopian times.”
Because capitalism can even turn End Times into a financial opportunity, there are now multiple companies vying for our face mask dollars, which has, in turn, put the “fashion” element at the forefront of differentiation factors.
“In California,” the story said, “a company called Vogmask has all but cornered the market with its brightly colored designs. And abroad, companies like Airpop and Respro are entering the fold.” There’s also mention of a company called Freka that sells “stylish masks” for over $100, which sure.
While these masks are “still niche in the United States,” — they’ve gained more traction in Asia — the story did (somewhat clumsily) try to make a correlation between them and sunglasses, saying that the two are quite similar in both use and function. And sure, they both block out irritants and require the wearer to hide part of their face, so I guess they’re not all the way wrong. But man do the masks feel dark.
On one hand, it seems insane that we’d care about aesthetics as the air becomes actually poisonous, but on the other hand, we’re vapid fucking creatures (it’s a big part of why we’re in this climate mess in the first place) and if we can make the apocalypse both fashion and capitalism, we absolutely will.
You can read more about it at Vox.
