Mask Padding Guide

For all our customers, our masks arrive without any padding inserted. Instead, it’s packaged separately as blue foam pieces, and it may not be clear right away how to use them.

It’s important to get your mask’s padding right, for comfort whilst wearing the mask as well as the way it looks on your body from the outside.

Here’s what comes with your mask:

  • 4x Circular pads - 12cm diameter, 2.5cm thick
  • 3x Small Rectangle Pads - 12cm long x 7.5cm wide x 3.5cm deep
  • 3x Large Rectangle Pads - 13cm long x 8cm wide x 4.5cm deep
  • 4x Double-Sided Velcro Rough Pieces - 6cm long x 2.5cm wide



The basic rules

Here are the important things to remember:

  1. The mask should fit snugly, not so tight that it hurts, and not so loose that it isn’t staying on your head.
  2. Your eyesight should align with either the upper or lower sight lines out of the mask, but not both
  3. Your neck should still be visible underneath the mask from most angles
  4. The mask should face the same way you are facing. It shouldn’t sit angled up or down when you are looking straight ahead.
  5. The mask shouldn’t tip or slide around your head, like a bobblehead figure


These rules are what we will focus on to make sure you’re wearing your mask correctly!


Troubleshooting problems

Neck disappearing

This is often caused by a lack of padding in the top of the mask, making the entire mask sit lower and causing your neck to be partially or completely covered up. It’s likely that you’re looking through the upper eye sights when you should be using the lower ones.

Re-arrange to increase the top padding, which will raise the mask above your neck and shoulders.

Mask facing upwards

There’s multiple ways this can happen:

First is that you’re using the wrong vision ports, e.g. looking through the lower ones at an angle instead of the higher set. Similar to the above, you can fix this by adjusting the pads at the top, so that your eyeline is aimed through the upper ports.

Secondly, the mask may be putting excess pressure on your nose, meaning it needs to be pushed upwards. To resolve this, add more forehead padding to shift the mask forward (or your head backwards) slightly and give you more room.

Third, if the edge at the front of the mask is pressing against your neck, it can cause discomfort and start to angle upwards. Forehead padding helps resolve this as well, giving more of a gap between where the mask ends and the front of your neck.

Fourth, the mask’s own weight might cause it to slip backwards and upwards - often due to longer hairstyles or large accessories. This can be helped by fitting the padding tighter to your head, and by including more at the back in order to support the weight.

Mask slipping forward

This isn’t as common, but it can still happen from time to time. To fix this, make sure the pads are fitting snugly around your head at the sides, and especially at the back.

‘Bobblehead’ effect and tipping to the side

This is fixed by simply inserting more padding until the mask is snugly sat on your head, in a similar way to a motorbike helmet.

Headaches after wearing

Often discomfort and headaches are caused by padding that is too tight, applying pressure to your head and especially on the bridge of the nose - remove and rearrange them to loosen the fit to something ‘snug but comfy’ instead, and make sure to rest for a while until you feel better before trying the mask on again.


Things to Remember

Ask a friend!

It can be helpful to have a friend checking from outside when you’re wearing your mask! Whilst looking through the vision ports directly at them, ask if your mask is aiming up or down, or to either side, as well as checking if the mask sits correctly and your neck isn’t being obscured too much.


Try out different pads!

With our masks, we include more padding than most people will actually need, so that you will usually have spares in case you need them. For example, you can double up two pads into a larger one using the included double-sided velcro pieces.


Keep your shape in mind!

Our masks are not made-to-measure, the base design is produced with taller and broader builds in mind, within a healthy weight range. Even though the mask can comfortably fit shorter or smaller-framed people inside, it might not be suitable for them in terms of overall aesthetics.

Unfortunately scaling the design of our masks larger or smaller is a tricky process, due to the fitment and thickness of individual parts, and re-fitting everything to a differently sized base shell will be a process that takes considerable time.


Hopefully this guide can help both existing and new DAME customers to get the most out of their mask, look their best and feel comfortable while doing it!

Written by Convoluted and Emily

Contributed to by Charlotte and Lillian

Published on