My name is Ethan Brooke, and I’m the person behind BreatheSafeAir. Here is the short story of how the site came to be, and why I write about something a lot of people find surprisingly dull.
How does someone end up writing about air pollution, masks and filtration? Honestly, almost by accident.
These days BreatheSafeAir is where I put air quality gear through its paces, monitors, purifiers, masks and respirators, and try to make sense of what the numbers actually mean. It started a long way from a test bench.
Davao, Philippines
New Zealand
50+ by hand
100+ by hand
How it started
I didn’t set out to write about air quality. It crept up on me over a decade of moving around, and the more places I lived, the harder it was to ignore. Here is roughly how a travel blog turned into this.
I grew up in New Zealand, home to the city with the cleanest air in the world. Air pollution was rarely a thought, and most people had never had a reason to reach for a respirator.
I moved to South Korea to study, and started a travel blog to document the experience and share it with others.
Plenty of expats arriving in Korea were worried about the air, yet there was almost nothing useful written about it in English. So I wrote two pieces, one on Seoul’s air pollution and one on the best fine-dust masks. The mask article quickly became my most read.
A global event sent everyone’s interest in respirators soaring. Within months I had written five articles on respirators alone, answering the questions no one else seemed to, like the real difference between an N95 and a KF94. Air pollution had quietly taken over my travel blog, so I gave it a home of its own: BreatheSafeAir.
I spent a year living in Vietnam, and visited India, my first real, first-hand experience of genuinely awful air. If I ever needed reminding why this information matters, that was it.
I started working with AirGradient, which taught me far more than I could have learned alone about how air quality monitors actually work, and the science underneath the readings.
I moved to the Philippines, where I live now and where I test everything you read about on the site.
I still can’t fully explain why this topic grabs me the way it does, but it has, ever since. That’s the story, and I hope you enjoyed it.
I should be upfront: I am not a credentialed expert. I never studied air pollution or respirators at university, and I learn about them in my own time, out of genuine interest.
What I can promise is care. I cite official sources wherever I can, and for mask and respirator reviews I rely on the third-party test results I have been provided, so what you read here stays accurate and checked. You can read more about my ethics and approach on my disclaimer page.
Questions or comments?
I’m always happy to hear from readers. Email me any time and I’ll reply as soon as I can.
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