My Mouth Tape Experiment
Mark Honeychurch - 9th November 2026
A few weeks ago I wrote about mouth tape, and threatened to buy some from Temu. So, while recording the Yeah… Nah! Podcast a few weeks ago, I jumped onto Temu, added a $5 box of tape to my basket, and clicked to check out:
What I loved about this particular tape was that it was at the top of the search results on Temu for “mouth tape”, despite the image for the product stating “This product is not intended to be affixed to the mouth”. It also has a warning in the description that starts “This Product Should Not Be Applied…”, but the last part of the warning has been truncated. Overall, I was filled with confidence in the idea that I should be sticking this product to my mouth.
The package arrived about a week later, and I tried the tape a few nights later:
As a beard wearer, I think these tapes aren’t designed for someone like me. There seems to be sufficient stickiness to hold the tape to my lips, but without the extended reach over the lips and onto the surrounding skin, I felt like my installation was more precarious than it was meant to be. This was confirmed about half an hour after I fell asleep, when I woke up to find the tape had detached from my top lip and was flapping from my bottom lip. I reattached it and went back to sleep. A couple of hours later, when I woke again, the tape was nowhere to be seen.
My son came into the bedroom the next morning and immediately asked what the weird black thing on the side of the bedsheet was. I was confused until I looked down and saw that, overnight, the mouth tape had somehow made its way from my mouth, half way down the bed, and onto the sheet.
At least my wife did report a positive result - apparently I didn’t snore for the time I was wearing the mouth tape. And I was surprised how easy it is to breathe through your nose when forced to - I had wondered whether, over time, maybe it would start to feel a little restrictive and hard to breath, but this didn’t happen at all.
I ran a couple of follow-up experiments, this time attaching the tape in the morning on the weekend when I first woke up. The first time the tape didn’t manage to stay attached for very long. The second time I had real problems getting it to stick properly all the way around my mouth (maybe my moustache had grown enough to be problematic). Because of the bad seal, after I fell asleep I somehow managed to draw enough breath through the gaps in the tape to be able to snore with it still on.
It’s not much fun peeling the tape off, as it feels like it might be taking a little bit of lip skin with it. But I guess given that I only had to wait for an hour or two for it to fall off naturally, this wasn’t a huge problem for me.
One afternoon I tiptoed up to my wife while she was napping, and tried to stick a piece of tape over her mouth. However she knows me too well, and woke up just as I was about to attach it. This was followed by a dirty look and a warning, in no uncertain terms, that she was not interested in being the active part of my experiment.
A few days after I had finished my experiments, while doing the laundry, I noticed something odd as I was carrying my bedding downstairs. Sure enough, there it was - another piece of mouth tape, stuck fast to the duvet cover. These damn things get everywhere!
I’ll leave you with some parting words of wisdom:
Hypothetically, if someone in bed with you were to fart while you were wearing one of these mouth tapes, you would find yourself forced to smell said fart. I would strongly recommend either sleeping alone, or ensuring your family stays away from brussels sprouts, beans, soft drinks and other flatulence-inducing kai in the hours before you try out your tape.