Do employees need to wear beard net when wearing dustmasks?

Hello all,

maybe someone can comment more, but we are experiencing issues with employees who have beard/mustache in the production area. As we are working with dry products in most areas people need to wear dust masks. We also have internal procedure that people who has more than 3 mm beard/mustache is obligated to wear a beard netting.

Here comes the issue that people finds it uncomfortable to  wear both at the same time. How is it in your company?

I think that the dust mask primarily protects against inhaling particles, while the beard net helps maintain cleanliness by containing facial hair, which could otherwise pose a contamination risk and they need to wear it want it or not.

Please share your experience and opinions

Hi INL,

Maybe you could get some disposable balaclavas to trial, we use them on my site, there should be no issues wearing a facemask under those.

Example in the link:

Economy Blue Disposable Balaclava - Various Colours - Hairnets - Disposables (g-i-s.co.uk)

The dust mask protects the person from the environment, the beard net protects the product from the person.  One does not replace the other.

Discomfort is a reason for other options to be offered, like the balaclava, not a reason to ignore safety requirements.

Ultimately if people are having "trouble" following both rules, you can just require them to be clean shaven and remove the beardnets as an option.  Then they can "comfortably" wear the dustmask.

Dust mask only covers the mouth and nose area, would fail to contain any hair on the neck, cheek or jawlines.  Letting employees skip the beard net if they wear a mask will lead to arguments when a supervisor observes the facial hair around the mask uncontained: "But SOP says I'm fine with only a dust mask!"

Thank you everyone for your experience/opinion. I really appreciate that. Employees were both - dust masks and beard net - even in their opinion is very uncomfortable, we gave couple of solutions what could make their day less uncomfortable, we will see if that will work. 
Ideally would be if they would shave and as a colleague here mentioned before  "Then they can "comfortably" wear the dustmask" and that would be actually the correct way to do that. In food industry there are very little of "but" and I could not agree more.

Also thank you for inspiration regarding the balaclava, we will look into that as well! 

hi :) 

We had the same issue. 

Balaclava sorted our problem. 

;)