What Is the Best Way to Remove Goggles or a Face Shield?

The safest way to remove goggles or a face shield is to grasp the device from behind your head, using the headband, elastic strap, or earpieces rather than the front surface, and pull it away from your face in a forward-and-upward motion. The front of any eye protector is the most contaminated part, and touching it during removal is one of the most frequently observed mistakes in healthcare settings. Research consistently shows that the removal phase of personal protective equipment is where contamination is most likely to happen, so the technique matters more than most people assume.

Why Removal Is the Riskiest Step

Putting on protective equipment is relatively straightforward. Taking it off is where things go wrong. In a study observing healthcare workers during care of patients with respiratory viral infections, roughly 90% of doffing events were performed incorrectly, whether due to wrong sequencing, poor technique, or touching contaminated surfaces during the process.¹ That number is striking, and it was not observed among untrained members of the public but among working clinicians.

The logic behind this vulnerability is simple: by the time you remove your gear, the outer surfaces have spent time facing the hazard they were designed to block. Respiratory droplets, body fluids, and other contaminants settle on the front of face shields and the rims of goggles. Every time your bare fingers brush that outer surface during removal, you transfer those contaminants to your skin, and from there to your face, clothing, or anything else you touch. Research examining doffing errors found that touching the contaminated external surfaces of goggles was one of the four most common mistakes, alongside improper respirator removal, contaminating scrubs with dirty hands and elbows, and skipping hand hygiene steps.²

How to Remove Goggles Safely

Goggles sit closer to the face than a face shield and typically seal around the eyes with a foam or rubber gasket. That seal means the contaminated surface is the entire front lens and the outer edges of the frame. To remove them correctly, follow this general approach:

Clean your gloves first: If you are still wearing gloves, perform hand hygiene on the gloves (or change to a fresh pair) before touching the goggle strap. The goal is to avoid transferring contaminants from your gloves to the strap and then to your hair and skin.
Reach behind your head: Grasp the elastic headband or the arms of the strap at the back of your head, not at the temples or the front frame.
Lift forward and away: Pull the strap over the top of your head and tilt the goggles forward, away from your face. Avoid letting the front lens drag across your forehead, nose, or cheeks on the way off.
Handle by the strap only: Once the goggles are off, continue holding them by the strap. If you are discarding them, drop them directly into a waste container. If they are reusable, set them lens-down on a disinfection surface or into a designated bin.
Perform hand hygiene immediately: Whether you were wearing gloves or not, clean your hands as soon as the goggles are set down. This step gets skipped constantly in real-world observations.

The key principle is that your fingers never touch the front lens or the outer rim during any part of this process. If you feel the frame wobble and instinctively reach for the front to stabilize it, you have just defeated the purpose of careful removal.

How to Remove a Face Shield Safely

Face shields extend further from the face and typically attach via a headband, a foam forehead pad, or clips that hook over the ears. The entire visor surface, from forehead to chin, should be considered contaminated. The removal steps are similar in principle to goggles but differ in the mechanics:

Grasp the headband or forehead piece: Reach for the band at the back or top of your head. If the shield uses ear hooks, grasp the hooks behind your ears rather than pulling the visor forward by its edges.
Tilt forward, then lift: Tip the visor away from your face by pulling the headband forward and upward. Let the visor swing away from you rather than toward you. The goal is to keep the contaminated inner-facing splash zone pointed away from your body as it comes off.
Avoid snapping the headband: Elastic headbands can spring back and fling droplets if released suddenly. Maintain a controlled grip and lower the shield deliberately rather than letting elastic do the work.
Dispose or set down by the band: Hold the shield by its headband until it reaches the waste bin or cleaning area. Do not grab it by the visor to adjust your grip.
Hand hygiene again: Same rule as goggles. Hands get cleaned immediately after the shield is set down.

One practical difference: face shields are large and awkward. The visor can bump your chest or shoulders on the way off, transferring contaminants to your clothing. Try to lean slightly forward so the visor clears your torso as it comes away from your head.

The Sequence Problem

Removing goggles or a face shield does not happen in isolation. In a clinical setting, you are also removing gloves, a gown, and a respirator or surgical mask. The order in which you take these items off matters enormously, because removing one item can contaminate another.

Most institutional protocols call for removing gloves first (they are the most contaminated item), followed by hand hygiene, then the gown, then hand hygiene again, then eye protection, then the respirator or mask, and then a final round of hand hygiene. Eye protection comes off before the mask for a specific reason: your mask still protects your nose and mouth while you handle the contaminated goggles or face shield near your face. If you remove the mask first, any slip during goggle removal can send contaminants straight to your mouth or nose.

Getting the sequence wrong was among the most commonly observed errors in doffing studies. Healthcare workers frequently removed the face shield and mask together as a single unit, which means the mask’s straps drag across the contaminated outer surface of the shield.¹ The instinct to “just get it all off at once” is understandable, especially after a long shift, but it is one of the fastest paths to self-contamination.

Where Contamination Actually Ends Up

When researchers used fluorescent tracers to map where contamination lands during flawed doffing, the results were revealing. The areas most frequently contaminated were the non-dominant hand and wrist, the chest, the lower legs, and the abdomen.² The hand and wrist findings make intuitive sense: your hands do the work of removal, and the non-dominant hand tends to stabilize items while the dominant hand manipulates straps. The chest and abdomen contamination comes from the gown and face shield brushing against the body during removal.

This mapping matters because it tells you what to watch for. If you notice the front of a face shield dragging across your scrub top, or if your wrist brushes the outer rim of your goggles, those are the moments contamination transfers. Awareness of these specific contact points can help you correct your technique in real time rather than performing the whole sequence on autopilot.

Cleaning Reusable Eye Protection

Disposable face shields and single-use goggles go straight into the waste bin after removal. Reusable goggles, which are more common in clinical settings because of their better fit and seal, need proper decontamination before they can be worn again. The World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, in guidance applicable to clinical settings broadly, specifies that reusable eye protection must be cleaned and disinfected according to the manufacturer’s reprocessing instructions before reuse, while disposable eye protection should simply be discarded.³

In practice, most hospital-grade reusable goggles can be wiped down with EPA-registered disinfectant wipes or soaked in a dilute bleach solution, then rinsed and air-dried. The important step that people skip is checking the manufacturer’s instructions, because some lens coatings degrade with certain disinfectants, and a scratched or clouded lens reduces visibility and defeats the purpose of wearing goggles at all. If the anti-fog coating is damaged by the wrong cleaning agent, the goggles fog up during use, which then tempts the wearer to adjust them with contaminated hands, creating a new infection risk.

Why Training With Fluorescent Tracers Works

Telling someone the correct technique is far less effective than showing them where they went wrong. Simulation exercises that use ultraviolet-fluorescent tracers have become one of the most effective ways to train people in PPE doffing. In these exercises, a fluorescent liquid is applied to the outside of the PPE before the trainee removes it. Afterward, the trainee stands under a UV light, and every place where contamination transferred to skin or clothing glows brightly.

A simulation framework called VIOLET demonstrated significant contamination from different exposure events, and participants reported it was a highly effective learning tool.⁴ Separate research comparing training methods among intensive care nurses confirmed that UV-fluorescent simulation increased awareness of contamination routes in ways that traditional verbal or written instruction did not.⁵

The psychological effect matters too. Seeing a bright smear of fluorescent dye across your forearm or chest after what you thought was a careful removal is a visceral experience. It sticks with people in a way that a lecture about “avoiding contact with contaminated surfaces” simply does not.

Voice-Prompted Guidance Reduces Mistakes and Stress

Even well-trained healthcare workers make errors under fatigue and time pressure. One approach that has shown strong results is providing real-time audio prompts during the removal process. A study evaluating an intelligent voice prompting system found that PPE-removal accuracy jumped from 78% to 100% when the system guided workers through each step. Psychological stress scores and operational fatigue scores both dropped substantially with the system in use.⁶

This makes sense when you consider the cognitive load involved. A correct doffing sequence can involve a dozen or more discrete steps, each with specific hand-hygiene pauses. After a grueling shift, remembering whether you are supposed to remove the goggles before or after the gown, and whether you have performed hand hygiene between each step, is genuinely difficult. An audio cue that says “now remove eye protection by grasping the strap behind your head” at the right moment offloads that mental burden. Even a printed checklist posted on the wall of a doffing area, or a colleague serving as a “doffing buddy” who reads the steps aloud, can replicate some of this benefit.

High-Consequence Settings Demand Extra Rigor

The stakes of sloppy removal escalate dramatically when the pathogen involved is highly lethal. During Ebola outbreaks, for example, the virus is transmitted through direct contact with infected bodily fluids, and even a small lapse during doffing can be fatal. Protocols for Ebola-level pathogens call for structured, instructed donning and doffing procedures that go well beyond standard precautions.⁷

In these settings, a trained observer watches every step of the removal process and verbally confirms each one before the worker proceeds. The goggles or face shield are typically removed by the observer rather than by the wearer, or the wearer removes them under direct, step-by-step verbal guidance with no deviation permitted. Disinfectant is often sprayed directly onto the PPE before each item is removed, so that any inadvertent contact with the outer surface encounters a decontaminated layer rather than live pathogen. These protocols are too resource-intensive for routine clinical care, but they illustrate the principle: removal technique is the last line of defense, and the more dangerous the hazard, the more deliberate and supervised the process needs to be.

Practical Tips for Non-Clinical Settings

Not everyone removing goggles or a face shield is in a hospital. Lab workers, construction crews, welders, woodworkers, and hobbyists all use eye and face protection against chemical splashes, dust, debris, and UV radiation. The contamination risk profile is different from an infectious-disease setting, but the basic principle of not touching the dirty side holds.

If you have been grinding metal and your face shield is coated in fine particulate, removing it by grabbing the visor means you now have metal dust on your fingers, which ends up in your eyes or lungs when you rub your face. If you have been working with chemical solvents and your goggles are splashed, pulling them off by the lens frame transfers that chemical to your skin. The habit of reaching behind your head for the strap is universal good practice, not just a clinical protocol.

For industrial and hobbyist use, a few additional considerations apply. Face shields used for grinding or cutting accumulate debris on the inner foam pad. Periodically clean or replace the forehead pad, because sweat and dust build up there and can cause skin irritation or push the shield out of position, tempting you to adjust it with dirty hands during use. Goggles used in dusty environments benefit from anti-fog treatment, since fogging is the number-one reason people pull their goggles down mid-task, exposing their eyes to whatever they were trying to block. Prevention of the adjustment urge is itself a safety measure.

The Design of the Equipment Affects Removal Safety

Not all face shields and goggles are equally easy to remove safely. Research evaluating different styles of eye protection found that the level of protection differed based on the design, with face shields and goggles performing best against frontal and overhead exposures and least well against exposures from below.⁸ That same design variability affects removal. Goggles with a single wide elastic band are easier to remove cleanly than those with two thin straps, because a single band can be grasped and pulled in one motion. Face shields with a ratcheting headband offer more stability during use but require fumbling with a mechanism at the back of the head during removal, increasing the time your hands are near contaminated surfaces.

When you have a choice, favor equipment with simple, tool-free release mechanisms. Some face shields are designed with a snap-off visor: you grasp the headband, pop the visor free, and drop it straight into the waste. The headband, which sits against your forehead and is relatively clean, stays in your hand. This design separates the contaminated component from the retention system and makes clean removal almost foolproof. If your workplace or facility is selecting PPE, ease of safe removal deserves as much weight as comfort and protection during wear.