Elena Bodnar's Emergency Bra: The Ig Nobel Face-Mask Invention

Originally published 2017-01-28.

The "emergency bra" is a real invention: a bra designed by Ukrainian-born physician and researcher Dr Elena Bodnar whose two cups can be detached and worn as two simple face masks, one for the wearer and one for someone nearby. It earned Bodnar and her co-inventors the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health. The idea is clever and memorable, but it is best understood as a low-tech dust and smoke barrier, not a substitute for a certified respirator or gas mask.

Below is how the design works, where the idea came from, what the Ig Nobel award actually means, and what the device can and cannot do in a real emergency.

How the emergency bra turns into two masks

From the outside it looks like ordinary underwear. The difference is in the construction. The cups are shaped and layered so that each one can sit over the nose and mouth, and the bra is built to come apart in the middle. In practice the sequence is simple:

• take the bra off and pull it apart at the centre,
• place one cup over your own nose and mouth,
• loop the strap around the back of your head to hold it in place,
• hand the second cup to another person.

Anyone who has listened to an airline safety briefing will recognise the movement: cup over the face, strap behind the head, breathe normally. Bodnar sold the product online for a while under the name EBbra, and press coverage around 2010 listed it at about 29.95.

Bodnar often demonstrated the design herself, holding the red prototype up over her clothes so audiences could see how the halves separate. The colour was a deliberate choice: it made the item easy to spot on stage and in photographs.

Chernobyl: the disaster behind the idea

Bodnar was born and trained in Soviet Ukraine and has said that her interest in protective equipment grew out of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident and its medical aftermath. She later moved to Chicago, where she presented the bra to the press. Her reasoning, as reported at the time, was that in the first chaotic hours after a disaster people rarely have protective equipment to hand, yet almost every woman is already wearing something that could be adapted.

She linked the idea specifically to radioactive iodine. In interviews she suggested that cheap masks, available immediately, might have reduced how much iodine-131 people took in after the explosion.

That point deserves a little more precision. Iodine-131 has a half-life of about eight days and collects in the thyroid gland. Its main long-term effect after Chernobyl was a rise in thyroid cancer, mostly among people who were children or teenagers at the time, rather than acute radiation sickness. A large share of that exposure came through contaminated food, especially fresh milk, not only through the air. Protective measures that made a real difference included restricting contaminated milk and giving stable iodine (potassium iodide) tablets, which Poland handed out widely to children. A face covering could help with inhaled particles, but it would not have solved the food problem.

The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health

The Ig Nobel Prizes are run by the science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research, founded by Marc Abrahams, and have been awarded since 1991. Ten prizes are handed out each year, traditionally by genuine Nobel laureates, to research that, in the organisers' own phrase, makes people "laugh, and then make them think".

In 2009 the Public Health prize went to Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee and Sandra Marijan for a brassiere that can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks. Bodnar collected it in person and, according to accounts of the ceremony, demonstrated the bra on stage with the help of the laureates presenting the awards.

Her acceptance speech became the most quoted part of the evening. She explained that a woman needs only a few seconds to remove, convert and put on her own mask, then joked that the remaining 20 seconds are spent wondering "who the lucky man is she is going to save." The laugh was the point, but so was the serious message underneath it.

The short video above shows the conversion and gives a sense of how quickly the two halves come apart.

Would it actually protect you?

This is the question most readers want answered, and the honest answer is: partly, for some hazards, and not for others.

What a fabric mask can help with

A layered fabric cup held snugly over the face can reduce how much coarse dust, ash and smoke particles you breathe in for a short time. That matters when the alternative is nothing at all, for example while leaving a building during a fire or walking through a dust cloud after a collapse.

What it cannot do

• Gases and vapours: chemical gases pass through ordinary fabric. Real gas masks use activated-carbon or other specialised filters.
• Fit: a cup shape that suits one face may leak around another, and leaks let unfiltered air in.
• Certification: no published independent testing shows that the bra meets respirator standards such as N95 or FFP2.
• Radiation itself: a mask can reduce inhaled radioactive particles, but it does nothing against external radiation or contaminated food and water.

In other words, the emergency bra is a better-than-nothing barrier, not personal protective equipment in the professional sense. If you live in an area with a specific risk, such as wildfire smoke or industrial accidents, the practical step is to keep a few certified masks at home and in the car and to follow official emergency advice. Anyone with a lung or heart condition should talk to a doctor about what protection suits them.

A version for men and other follow-ups

When the bra first made headlines, Bodnar said that a male counterpart was being developed, and technology sites reported the plan. Its design was never made clear, and no men's model appears to have reached the market. The bra reportedly received a new wave of attention in 2020, when face coverings suddenly became part of daily life during the COVID-19 pandemic and old clips of the Ig Nobel demonstration circulated again.

Some viral retellings have exaggerated how widely the bra was used. It was a real design that was sold for a time, but it remained a niche product rather than standard emergency kit.

Why a funny invention still matters

It is easy to treat the emergency bra purely as a joke, and Bodnar clearly enjoyed the humour. Yet the idea behind it is sound emergency thinking: the protective gear that helps most is the gear you actually have with you when something goes wrong. Many disaster plans fail at exactly that step, because masks, water and torches are stored somewhere other than where people are.

The invention also reflects a pattern seen in many good public-health ideas. Simple, cheap and familiar tools tend to be used; complicated ones tend to be left in a drawer. Whether or not anyone ever needs to pull apart a bra in a crisis, the question it raises is worth asking: what in your everyday routine could help you breathe, see or call for help if the next hour turned into an emergency?

For the record, the original reporting on this story came from AnonHQ, written by Vandita, drawing on the Associated Press and CNET.

Sources: Wikipedia: List of Ig Nobel Prize winners (2009 Public Health); Wikipedia: Ig Nobel Prize; Improbable Research: The bra inspired by the Chernobyl disaster; Salon (24 September 2010); Wikipedia: Iodine-131; AnonHQ (original report by Vandita).