This and xupermask are just cringe consoomer mush. It's honestly shocking to me the trust that people put into celebrities and tech companies. Capitalists "disrupting" a regulated industry should be a big red flag.
Note that n95 is the minimum grade for biohazard and industrial work. It meams it'll get large particulates (like corona viruses) but not small ones and aerosolized oil (such as spray paint) will fuck your mask.
Because the seals on the mask itself weren't rated and they didn't go through FDA authorization. You HAVE to go through FDA clearance if you want to claim your product meets medical standards.
If it's got N95 filters in it, but the design is flawed in such a way that air can just flow around the filters even with ideal fitment, then the mask as a whole is not N95. Now, maybe their design wasn't flawed, we don't actually know that, but N95 is a NIOSH standard only given to products that NIOSH has received and tested to be at a certain standard; Razer neglected to submit their masks to NIOSH in order to get an official rating. Razer could have performed their own tests and listed the level of particulates it blocks at various levels, but marketing it as an N95 respirator implied NIOSH had verified it when they hadn't, which is fraud.
I mean, use for 10 years by what metric? A woodworker is gonna block up that filter in a few months, someone who works in a hospice might get a few years, and triage nurses might burn through them in half that simply due to moving fast. Also I think 10 years might be a bit of a stretch in general, I've never known a mask filter to last that long in any model I've used
The 3m 6035 filter only has a replacement schedule for infection control reasons, implying the outside may become too contaminated.
It was the original pandemic filter (there is a model up that does organic vapours too), marketed as being used for at least one pandemic wave.
No filter will last 10 years of daily use, at some point even your washable car filters or cleanable air purifier filters clog up and break down. But these are very long lasting for what they do, and I can see someone being able to stretch them out to one every six months, if in a hospital setting.
You do understand that all materials degrade right? Something that needs to block put particles so incredibly small isn't going to be reusable. In a medical setting you would likely not want to have to handle the contaminated filter anyways, so being able to replace one with 100% efficiency would sound like the right move.
I bought one of these masks for the novelty, as well as the influence to buy it during the Great Lockdown when not much was known about Covid and we were wiping down our groceries. By the time the product launched, we already knew how Covid spread and had a vaccine. Despite the advertising saying that it has N95 filters, it was clear that this was not an N95 product. Razer generically stated that it is not a certified N95 mask, but the advertising and product pages were certainly misleading and the FTC’s fine is valid and justified to protect the health and safety of consumers. I would not have used the Zephyr in place of my actual certified N95 masks.
The Zephyr was heavy, but overall quite comfortable, but I never took it outside and wore it for something like a grocery trip (since I knew it was not an N95 mask, and masks were very divisive where I live in a Red State. The last thing I wanted was to potentially be attacked by an anti-vax/mask Freedom Lover). It was heavy, and the fans were loud - very loud. What was disappointing was that the production version did not come with the two features I wanted that were initially advertised: the sanitising case, and the voice amplifier. Imagine how much more fines Razer would face if they advertised an included UV case that came with blue lights rather than UV lights!
I didn’t end up keeping the Zephyr, although I wish I did just to keep a small, unique memory of an uncertain and dangerous time. I do wonder if they could have launched this product sooner and certified it as an N95 mask, if gaming culture could make wearing masks when you’re sick popular. Selfish people might put aside their “freedoms” if they could look cool with gamer RGB and get attention from others (the motivation for selfishness). Of course the Zephyr would need to go through several years of revisions until it became culture.
I still don't understand how nobody knew Covid was a respiratory disease. Even my parents were saying they wore gloves to the store and not a mask. I had 95s from doing work in the attic and sent them over to them. My wife was pregnant at the time and I had to beg her to wear one when we went to her checkups at the hospital. Not even the doctor was wearing one at the time and we got a lot of strange looks. By the time she had the baby they had strict rules in place, those first few months were wild.
