Right now, thanks to unwell hogs, surgical masks are selling like Wayfarers the summer before last. But in Japan, ever since the Visual Kei explosion of the late eighties, rocking a surgical mask has been considered a viable look; so now that the rest of the world is getting a taste of it, don’t be surprised if it catches on and fashion is inherited by guys who look like Thunderbirds chicks, like Die from Visual Kei superstars Dir en Grey.

By the way, not just any old surgical masks will save you from swine flu, they just stop you being splashed with body fluids and prevent you spreading dirt from your hands to your mouth and nose. If you want total safety you need to be wearing masks that conform to US standard NIOSH N95 or European standard EN 149 FFP2, as modeled here by me with fond memories of ultimate face mask wearers Altern 8.

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If your not up on your Visual Kei it’s a visually driven hard rock/cyber punk music scene. It can be pretty much summed up by scene magazine Shoxx’s regular cover line “Visual and Hard Shock”.

So it’s not all bad news then this flu, look what some bright spark did when bird flu was coming to kill us.

DARYOUSH NAJ-HAJAFI