Hazmat Suit

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"I kind of like it in here; it's private."

— Jamie Hyneman on the unexpected perks of safety equipment, MythBusters

If you want a good idea if something dangerous is up—probably involving Applied Phlebotinum, Deadly Gas, biological or Fast-Killing Radiation—look for workers wearing Hazmat Suits.

For dramatic reasons, this may correspond with Malevolent Masked Men or Faceless Goons in visual media. On the other hand, with sympathetic characters, it often turns out that In hazardous environments, everyone can see your face.

If the suits suffer Clothing Damage during dangerous conditions, you can be certain bad things will happen afterwards. Armor Is Useless can apply sometimes, making it all the worse.

In Real Life, not really so sexy as it seems. A Level A Hazmat suit is heavy, clumsy, hot, and uncomfortable. The same properties that see to it that nothing outside can get in also see to it that nothing inside can get out, which includes the wearer's sweat and body odor. You're just out of luck if you are in one when you suffer a Potty Emergency (yes, the CDC do ask if you can hold your pee when you apply to work in a Biosafety Level 4 lab). Plus there's the fact that you're wearing it because something nearby is likely to kill you. In addition, it can get unpleasant if you get an itch or something like that while in the suit and inside hazardous ground, as you can't simply open the suit to get at the itch right there and then.

Then there's the thing to the right, which is a heat resistant suit worn when working around things that are excessively hot, such as oil rig fires, iron smelters, active volcanoes, and replicas of invading triremes. You're wearing it because otherwise you'd be turned into a crispy critter in minutes. Even with it, though, you feel like you're in a sauna while wrapped in an unusually stiff duvet, oven mitts, and a hockey helmet.^note Except when it is equipped with a cooling system, in which case you fell like you're wrapped in a cold stiff duvet, oven mitts and a hockey helmet. And have to lug a thick hose/cable or a heavy backpack around.

Hazmat or NBC protection is often included in Powered Armor. Often seen with a Decontamination Chamber. See also Phlebotinum-Handling Equipment, Kryptonite-Proof Suit, and Gas Mask Mooks. Contrast Containment Clothing, which is worn to prevent your powers from hurting others. For an old, usually medical themed version see Plague Doctor. For the more stylish variant of this trope see Gas Mask, Longcoat. See also Fantastic Radiation Shielding.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Intel's disco-dancing guys from the late 90s/early 2000s seem to be wearing these, but they're actually "clean suits" used when making microchips. Cleansuits aren't to protect you from your surroundings, they're to protect your surroundings from you (or rather from your moisture/dust). Still, the overall effect's the same.
• An ad for Dr. Pepper has the soft drink mysteriously appearing all over the world, presumably sent by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Eventually a woman wearing a hazmat suit with a hole for the straw takes the risk of taking a sip (which defeats the whole purpose of wearing one) and declares her approval, enabling the rest of the human race to gulp it down too.

Anime and Manga

• The Nimuge demons from Doraemon: Nobita and the Animal Planet wears protective suits all the time, due to their planet being a wasteland constantly drenched in acid rain. This makes the denizens of the animal planet believe them to be some sort of scary monsters and hides the fact that the Nimuge are Human All Along.
• In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Misato wears an anti-radiation suit when she tries to stop Jet Alone's nuclear reactor manually.
• In the first Rebuild of Evangelion movie, NERV staff are shown in full hazmat gear when cleaning up the aftermath of Unit 01's battle with Sachiel. Why is unclear.
  • The last two movies hint that whatever turned the terrain red during the Time Skip is apparently toxic to humans and whatever change causes Eva pilots to stop aging also immunizes them to it. In Q, Shinji goes outside in a hazmat suit when Kaworu shows him the aftereffects of Third Impact but is seen fine in a plugsuit at the end of the movie and based on the beginning of 3.0+1.0, plugsuits apparently suffice for regular people once fitted with sealed helmets.
• Used as part of The Reveal in the manga, Cage of Eden, where the heroes find a long abandoned research facility complete with broken People Jars, the DNA samples collected from every animal in the world in cultivation centers, models of the former extinct animals they had to fight the first time they crash landed on the mysterious island, and the aforementioned hazmat suits hanging around, which clues them that the everything on the island was the result of a secret experiment gone wrong.
• Subverted in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, where the government hires a group of full-body cyborgs for a cleanup job in Niihama harbor, specifically because their cyberization will negate any need for hazmat gear. As it turns out, one of the workers has faked cyberization to get the job; he immediately suffers radiation poisoning and dies. The "cleanup" was actually recovery of the contents of a destroyed nuclear power plant. The incident causes the government some major bad press thereafter.
• Aside from the titular characters, who are immune to radiation, everyone in Coppelion wears these inside the ruins of Tokyo.
• Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu. Sousake finds his bottle of biowarfare agent has been opened, so puts on an NBC suit and puts the class into Lock Down. His classmates angrily point out that he's the only one with a suit, so why should they listen to him when he's just trying to protect himself? Sousake then takes off his suit in a gesture of solidarity, which is immediately subverted when everyone beats him up for bringing a deadly virus into the classroom in the first place.

Comic Books

• DC Comics:
  • During the "Elegy" arc in Batwoman, Col. Kane is able to warn Batwoman that the terrorist Alice has a threat in the works that'll require "Mop for CW". He's actually referring to MOPP-4 (Mission Oriented Protective Posture 4), the US Army's term for its full set of NBC warfare gear.
  • The Quality Comics (originally)/DC Comics (nowadays) character the Human Bomb has worn one since the Golden Age.
  • Wonder Woman Vol 1: In Queen Atomia's introductory issue Diana wears a red hazmat suit with a fishbowl helmet while investigating the source of dangerous levels of radiation that Paula's sensors picked up.
• Marvel Comics:
  • A.I.M. uniforms are basically hazmat suits.
  • The former student of Avengers Academy appropriately named Hazmat wears one (a form-fitting one, unlike pretty much every other case), though in her case, it's to protect everyone else from her own toxicity.
  • Before Hazmat, the similarly-powered Radioactive Man also wore one briefly, though in his case it was purely cosmetic, he could control his own radiation just fine.
  • During his stint at Horizon Labs, Morbius wears a hazmat suit, partly out of scientific necessity but also because he doesn't want anyone to know it's him.
• The Beauty: CDC Agent Brandon is wearing a hazmat suit in her introductory scene, where she's informing Police Detectives Vaughn and Foster that she's taking the case of the dead woman off of the police's hands.
• The Final Plague: The people in the quarantined facility wear bright blue hazmat suits with goggles and respirators on their faces.
• Henchmen: The Supervillain Microwave makes his henchmen all wear hazmat suits as their work uniforms. That's because he emits low-level radiation constantly, and doesn't want his henchmen's premiums on their health insurance going up by 40%.
• In the Tintin album Destination Moon, Captain Haddock and Wolff put on protective suits so they can view the atomic pile. Professor Calculus also ordered a dog-sized suit made for Snowy to wear so he can go with them, but Snowy keeps tripping on the sleeves because the suit is too big for him. They also forget to take the suit off Snowy afterwards.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side had two ornery laborers, behind a door marked "Keep Out—Radioactive Area," tearing huge gashes in each other's suits.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fanfiction, Mariko and Alan Jonah's Mooks wear Hazmat Suits when approaching the San-Vivienne hybrid whom Jonah's organization are keeping caged.
  • Abraxas: Empty Fullness: The Dorats'/Ghidorah's stream of consciousness indicates that the Makers were wearing full-body protective suits which acted as armor when they went out into the wilds of the planet that the Dorats/Ghidorah originally came from.

• In Aeon Entelechy Evangelion they are usually seen at the aftermath of the Harbinger battles.
• All human forces in The Conversion Bureau: Cold War wear NBC (Nuclear Biological Chemical) gear to protect them from the potion.
• In the works of A.A. Pessimal, the canonical idea of Dwarfs of the Discworld wearing the equivalent of hazmat suits ("knockermen rig") for dealing with potential fire hazards in deep mines is built on. Members of the Guild of Assassins who deal with Exothermic Alchemy have discovered the potential of modified Dwarf protective clothing for when bomb disposal is called for.
• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. Commander Kotay is wearing a thermal suit in case the Flying Saucer is armed with a heat ray, causing Captain Proton to ask why he's dressed like a roasted chicken.
• Triptych Continuum: They appear and are called Hoovmat Suits, named for the family that made them. The main difference between a Hoovmat model and other fictional examples? Modern Hoovmats don't work. They fray at the seams under the pressure of breathing, blinking scratches the viewing panel, and multiple lawsuits have revealed that the manufacturer sees the central protection as the color. (They're generally used in wild zones: any other ponies spotting a hue that unnatural will know you're not something to be attacked. The fact that the color also serves as a beacon for monsters? Coincidental.) It's been directly said that the current generation of ownership has deviated from the inventor's vision, cutting on quality in favor of profit margin and running the business into the ground. Celestia estimates they have a few years left until the customer base is down to the Flower Trio, and it takes having Luna go through the company's books to force the current Hoovmat into creating a group of functional suits based on the original designs — something he openly resents.
• Rocketship Voyager
  • Members of the so-called Glowing Gang working in the engineering sections of Voyager's Cochrane Drive wear 'rad-suits' made of lead and cadmium.
  • A naked Captain Janeway wakes up in Sickbay inside a transparent pressure balloon used to protect casualties from blood and other contaminants that might be floating around in zero-gravity.

Film — Animated

• Once Upon a Forest depicts the humans who arrive near the end to clean up the gas leak as wearing hazmat suits to keep from breathing in said gas. It also emphasizes the Humans Are Cthulhu theme, as it makes them look like creepy, faceless aliens to the animal characters.
• The CDA in Monsters, Inc. wears hazmat suits.
• In Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus, Dib's body odor from how long he's been cooped up in his room is so bad that Gaz needs a hazmat suit just to get near him. Humorously, it's labeled as "[[{{Pun Gazmat]]".
• In Farmageddon the local The Men in Black all wear these, except in bright yellow, all the time. They are... not a very effective or successful alien containment agency, nuff said.

Film — Live-Action

• Used as a plot point in 10 Cloverfield Lane. An unexplained apocalypse, perhaps a chemical or nuclear attack, has made it dangerous to go outside the bunker. But it becomes increasingly obvious that staying in the bunker with their unstable host is even more hazardous. Fortunately, the female protagonist is an aspiring fashion designer, and uses this skill to start secretly MacGyvering an improvised hazmat suit and breathing mask from a shower curtain, a soda bottle and the ever-handy duct tape. It ends up being useful when she encounters what can only described as an alien crop duster, although she loses the mask to a hostile alien with a Lamprey Mouth.
• The "Alien Autopsy" film depicts men in hazmat suits dissecting an alien cadaver. The suits have no air filters or air supply.
• The Andromeda Strain: When Dr. Stone and Dr Hall investigate the town of Piedmont, they wear sealed suits to protect them against the disease. The original novel even has Stone thinking they look like the Michelin Man.
• Arrival: The First Contact Team wear a hazmat suit with independent oxygen supply over an anti-radiation vest when entering the alien spacecraft, more as a precaution than necessity as the aliens have created a human-friendly environment inside so they can communicate face-to-face.
• Austin Powers: In a Shout-Out to Dr. No, Dr. Evil wears a radiation suit while loading the nuclear bomb into the subterranean drill in International Man of Mystery.
• Back to the Future: Marty dons a radiation suit to handle the plutonium fuel for the DeLorean, and wears it during his trip into the past.
• The Blob (1988): The Government Conspiracy task force that arrives to town to collect the Blob wear white spacesuit-like NBC suits. They would be useful if the monster was still just the bacteria they designed, but against a mammoth acidic Blob Monster, well…
• Cat Women of the Moon: the hero dons a suit to combat a coolant leak, after the obligatory meteor shower damages their nuclear-powered Retro Rocket.
• Contagion (2011), naturally. The plot involves a terribly contagious virus causing mass death and pandemonium. Also a unique example of a layperson owning a hazmat suit, a conspiracy blogger who has supposedly found a cure — the fact that he's walking everywhere in a hazmat suit shows he's a fraud.
• The Crazies (1973): The army wears white hazmat suits that restrict their vision and make them stand out when attacked by the crazed civilians.
• The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008): Some poor sap in a hazmat suit is sent to replace the drill bit which breaks when they try drilling into GORT, unaware that its been eaten away by GORT's weaponized nanotech. Then the man realises that holes have started to appear in his hazmat suit and his superiors are refusing to open the door...
• Dune (2021): After Duke Leto uses a false tooth filled with Deadly Gas to kill everyone in the room with him, Harkonnen wearing rubber-like hazmat suits enter, pushing a large container of unknown purpose (a coffin or hazmat stretcher?) with a huge air hose reaching out the door. They're shocked to find that Baron Harkonnen is still alive, having used his anti-gravity suspensors to rise above the heavier-than-air gas.
• All the scientists in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial wear these to study E.T.
• In Friend of the World, two characters are wearing these while they make their way in from the outside.
• Godzilla (2014) shows Dr. Serizawa, Dr. Wates and the other M.U.T.O. researchers wearing these while investigating subterranean areas that have been frequented by radioactive Kaiju. Their suits have been somewhat modified with transparent face-plates and lights pointed at their faces so that the audience can more easily tell who's who.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it, Monarch personnel in full-body hazmat suits can be seen fleeing in the Argo's hangar when Griffin's Osprey makes an unorthodox landing.
• James Bond:
  • In Dr. No, the title character and his henchmen wear radiation suits while operating the nuclear reactor and in the Decontamination Chamber. Bond wears one too while Dressing as the Enemy.
  • In Moonraker, the scientists working on Hugo Drax's Deadly Gas in Venice do wear suits, but nothing to cover their heads, which makes them Too Dumb to Live (sure enough, they break a vial of the gas that Bond forgot and die).
  • In No Time to Die, the "farm" of the bio-technological weapon Herakles that Lyutsifer Safin wants to mass produce is a pool of acidic liquid. Its workers wear hazmat suits, lest they want to be dissolved (which later happens to the body of a guard and Dr. Obruchev).
• Part of the problem the crew of K-19: The Widowmaker had was that they had been issued suits rated for chemical hazards, not radioactive ones.
• Worn in Outbreak. Because if they didn't, they'd all discover a lot about the disease a little too personally.
• Predator 2: the special forces team hunting the Predator wear thermal suits so they won't show up on infra-red, also to shield them from the radioactive dust they intend to use to See the Invisible alien, and the liquid nitrogen sprays to freeze it. When the Predator becomes aware of their presence, the suits inhibit the soldiers from seeing it and fighting properly.
• Government epidemiologists wear these in [REC] and its American remake, Quarantine (2008).
• The end of Resident Evil (2002) features these.
• Hazmats are especially popular in movies where scientists are handling deadly chemicals that are inevitably released outside containment and cause the Zombie Apocalypse. Case in point is Return of the Living Dead 3, where hazmat suits prove to be useless to aggressive zombie attack.
• Nicolas Cage has problems with his suit's clumsy gloves in The Rock.
• Hazmat suits are worn by Royalton's workers when they install a inner-positive transponder in Speed Racer, and, for some reason, their little dog too.
• During the Training Montage in Spies Like Us, Milbarge and Fitz-Hume are seen wearing thermal suits. After taking a second for the audience to stew on this, the two are suddenly blasted with flamethrowers.
• Sputnik: When Dr. Klimova insists on getting Up Close with the Monster, the head of the facility will only agree if she wears a protective suit. The film is set in the 1980's Soviet Union so the suit has a dull-grey color and a cosmonaut-type helmet, though no air tanks.
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture featured two types of protective suits: the engineering suit (with optional helmet) worn by Scotty and members of his staff; and a more generic protective suit worn by some background extras. These suits would reoccur in the subsequent TOS-era films, with some modifications.
  • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan has a unique justified aversion: Scotty and the engineering crew wear hazmat suits, but even they aren't heavy-duty enough to withstand the radiation of the Enterprise's malfunctioning warp core. Spock, racing against the clock, doesn't even bother putting on Scotty's suit, only donning the gloves to keep his hands intact as long as possible as he gets the mains back online. Since he was already going in knowing it would be almost certainly a Heroic Sacrifice whether or not he put the suit on, it was only logical to not waste the time. He gets a massive dose of radiation that kills him within minutes.
• The obscure cult film Static has a scene where the main character visits his Crazy Survivalist uncle's house on Christmas, only to find the entire family wearing hazmat suits.
  "So, is this just a test, or do I have only seconds to live?"
• In These Are the Damned, the protagonists discover nine children hidden in a facility beneath a well-guarded military base. They realise something is wrong when the childrens' skin is cold and their guards all wear anti-radiation suits. Then they start feeling ill...

Literature

• Aurora Cycle: The members of Squad 312 don biosuits when exploring Octavia III out of caution after discovering several of their pursuers seem to have been infected by a virus there. Cat is infected by the Ra'haam pollen after her suit is torn open when the group is attacked by an infected chimpanzee.
• In Thud!, Dwarfs of the Discworld wear the equivalent of hazmat suits ("knockermen rig") when dealing with potential fire hazards in deep mines, such as pockets of lethal or inflammable gas.
• Due to the extreme Metaphorgotten of Help! My Story Has the Mary-Sue Disease, readers are repeatedly advised to wear hazmat suits because of the rotten eggs that have grown tentacles. The book is actually writing advice.
• Jam has people who fashion suits from garbage bags and packing tape to protect them from the Grey Goo-like substance that ate all of Australia's biomatter.
• Dean Koontz's Phantoms: when the military shows up to find out what happened to the town of Snowfield, they wear pressurized suits because they think the problem may be caused by chemical/biological warfare. The suits don't help them a bit against the Eldritch Abomination that's the real cause.
• The Dragon In The Sea, by Frank Herbert has a post-nuclear Cold War where nuclear subtugs are sent to covertly steal oil from underwater wellcaps, sometimes in radioactive zones. There's an ABG suit — also called a detergent suit as it's designed to enable oil and radiation to be washed off in the Decontamination Chamber using high-pressure detergent sprays.
• In one of the novels in William Marshall's Yellowthread Street series of Hong Kong thrillers, Sci Fi, a science fiction convention is terrorised by a "spaceman" killer disguised in a heat-resistant fire-fighting suit and armed with an improvised flamethrower.
• Free Flight by Douglas Termen. In a post-WW3 United States, the protagonist rigs up crude air filters made from plastic milk jugs. His girlfriend hates using them though, so she dies of radiation poisoning.
• Z for Zachariah. The prototype radiation suit worn by Loomis; unfortunately he only had time to make one of them before nuclear war broke out. This turns out to be a plot-point, as Loomis murdered his partner when he tried to steal the suit to go searching for his family. Eventually Ann steals the suit herself and leaves him stranded in the valley.
• The Stand : They’re used by the Army doctors that treat the Annette superflu victims and who basically imprison Stu in the lab in Vermont. Stu shoots the guy through the suit using the gun he wrestled from him.

Live-Action TV

• Blake's 7. The episode "Killer" is about a plague that breaks out on a Federation base. There are some bizarre examples of this trope, including hazmat suits that resemble waddling Michelin Men, and firefighting suits that look like silver fried eggs with legs.
• The lab team on Bones wore them in an episode until they confirmed their victim didn’t have an airborne virus. Aristoo still manages to prick his finger on a needle through his gloves.
• Breaking Bad: Walter and Jesse start wearing hazmat suits when they get a fully equipped meth lab from Gus. They need it, because the fumes the lab produces are toxic not only to breathe but on skin contact.
• Chernobyl:
  • The absence of these in the power plant has devastating effects on the engineers when the disaster happens.
  • General Pikalov puts a rubber NBC suit on to go measure the radiactivity of the exposed core, though it's really more the lead-lining put on the truck that protects him the most from the extreme radiations in this mission.
  • The liquidators who individually have 90 seconds to clean the graphite off the roof of Reactor #4 have crude improvised suits made of rubber with some lead-lined parts, protective goggles and a gas mask. That's not enough to withstand much radiations but that's all they have, hence the 90 seconds.
  • The decontamination cleaners seen later in Prypiat (and on the series' poster) seem to be better equipped.
  • The conscripts sent to clean up the surrounding area have an improvised version consisting of lead plates strapped over their groin.
    Bacho: We make these from lead scrap. Put it on under your balls.
    Pavel: Now?
    Bacho: No, no, you can wait until the radiation gives you a cunt. Yes, now. [Pavel begins pulling his pants down] Over your clothes! Fucking shit!
• A first-season episode of Chicago Hope dealt with this after a patient got infected. They quarantined several of the staff, but Waters and Birch are seen walking around the hospital in hazmat suits early on (until Waters later has to join the quarantine), with Birch's face mask fogging up due to a problem with his air supply.
• CSI used them in the episode "Crow's Feet," when a female victim was feared to have Ebola because of the bleeding sores on her ski . She actually was undergoing dermatology treatments that went wrong. There was least one other time as well, when Greg and Sara are feared exposed to something toxic.
• CSI: NY used them in "Page Turner," which involved a man who killed his wife and contaminated other people with a radioactive book.
• The Day of the Triffids (1981): The anti-triffid gear that Bill Masen wants to get his hands on includes an all-over plastic covering against the poisonous triffid stingers and a clear curved face mask to protect the eyes (the favourite point of attack for a triffid). We don't see it used often though, presumably because it's too uncomfortable for constant use.
• The Japanese mini-series The Days mentions a problem that's not often raised with this trope—the breathing masks and protective suits can only be used once as they become contaminated by radiation. The workers have to scour the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (which is without power and filled with wreckage from the tsunami and earthquake) for any spare equipment they can find. Plant manager Yoshida has a rare outburst of temper when the emergency centre at Tokyo refuses to send extra masks and hazmat suits on the helicopter taking the Prime Minster there for an inspection.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Planet of Fire" has as a key plot point the hazmat suits being mistaken for gods.
  • We see these in use in "Utopia", where the rising stet radiation present under the rocket ends up liquefying the poor sod wearing one. This prevents the rocket lifting off and sending someone else in there would be a death sentence. Luckily, the Doctor has Captain Jack Harkness at hand, who doesn't even need a suit.
  • In "Praxeus", Team Tardis are attacked by Malevolent Masked Men wearing gasmasks and protective clothing. Turns out they are alien scientists who have been infected by the eponymous virus and are trying to avoid infecting anyone else.
• There's a joke about this in an episode of Friends, when they're on the set of Outbreak 2: The Virus Takes Manhattan. A bunch of actors are standing around in hazmat suits, and Chandler asks, "Are you guys in the movie, or are you just really paranoid?"
• Fringe: The Fringe team occasionally have to don these when dealing with whatever weird science they're facing that week. In "What Lies Below", Walter and Astrid have to wear them to enter a building where a deadly virus has been released. On learning that Peter has been infected Walter removes the hood from his suit to make it clear that he won't leave without his son.
• In Helix, which depicts an outbreak of The Virus in an arctic research lab, these are part and parcel of interacting with the infected. Both CDC members and Arctic Biosystems staff use them. They're referred to as Racal Suits, a kind of containment suit specifically designed for work with pathogens.
• The CDC wear some in an episode of House when they think a patient has smallpox.
• During one sketch in Jackass, which involves eating the ingredients for an omelette, vomiting them into a pan, and then cooking it, Johnny Knoxville wears a hazmat suit.
• The League of Gentlemen parodies this when a team wear hazmat suits to examine "The Beast of Royston Vasey." First Mr Chinnery throws up in his suit and then, after an X Files style autopsy, the Beast is revealed to be several missing zoo animals, stitched together.
• Used in Monk during the garbage strike episode: Captain Stottlemeyer uses the combination of a maximum-level professional clean room (used for the manufacture of sensitive electronics) and suit to get the main character away from the contaminated city and into a fully-sterile environment, restoring Adrian to relative sanity.
• In the Netflix revival of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Ardy, the maintenance minion who sends the movies up to the satellite wears a full hazmat suit all the time, casting doubts on the safety of Kinga's "Kingachrome" system. In the second season he gets a talking dog who also wears a suit, even on walkies.
• The MythBusters have used fire suits (on the line of the page picture), hazmat suits, and bomb suits at different times.
• On NCIS, when HQ experiences a bio-attack with pneumonic plague, Gibbs is impatient to open his investigation despite being confined to Autopsy as per containment procedures. He and McGee Take a Third Option and put on hazmat suits so they can move around while maintaining isolation.
• Various characters wear them in The Pretender episodes "A Virus Among Us" and "Hazards".
• Quatermass II: Quatermass and his team watch film footage of the aftermath of a nuclear-powered Retro Rocket exploding in the Australian desert, killing hundreds. Men in 1950s hazmat suits are shown running Geiger counters over the area, which is Harsher in Hindsight given what was actually happening at Maralinga in the 1950s.
• All the incarnations of The Stand have them, but aside from the comics, they're most prominent in the TV film.
• Stargate Atlantis has the crew having access to these suits. This particularly applies when a dangerous infection breaks out and the city's operating system begins to lockdown the city on its own. However, two of the characters put on hazmat suits and the city somehow detects this and opens up doors for them as useful personnel who are properly equipped for the crisis. There's also an episode where Rodney insists on wearing a full suit on a planet with slightly higher UV radiation levels than normal, when everyone else just has sunscreen.
• Star Trek has featured different types of suits in its different incarnations:
  • The Original Series featured different types of protective suits in the early episodes "The Man Trap" and "The Naked Time". In the latter episode, the protective value was negated when Lt. Tormolen took a glove off to scratch his nose, exposing himself (and, subsequently, the crew of the Enterprise) to the virus that was responsible for the deaths of the crew of the Psi 2000 outpost.
    • "The Tholian Web" introduced a fully-sealed environmental suit, worn by the landing party aboard the Defiant.
  • The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Child" featured a protective suit worn during the transport of plague samples into a containment unit.
  • The space suits introduced in Star Trek: First Contact are sometimes used as protective suits in dangerous interior environments in later seasons of Deep Space Nine and Voyager.
• WandaVision: S.W.O.R.D. tries to send an agent into Westview wearing a hazmat suit through the sewer system. Wanda's Reality Warper powers turn it into a beekeeper's suit.

Spoken Word

• On his spoken-word CD, The Boxed Life, Henry Rollins talked about his experiences working at an NIH (National Institute of Health) facility after he graduated from high school. He helped care for the test animals in the facility, until some of the animals began dying unexpectedly. It was determined the animals contracted a disease called ectromelia. After that, everyone going anywhere near where the animals were kept had to wear what he called "Devo Suits" (most likely, Level D hazmat suits) while they exterminated the animals and sanitized the cages and rooms they were kept in.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun 2nd Edition had both chemsuits (regular sealed suits) and military X-E suits which were needed to protect against Seven-7 nerve gas.
  • In the adventure Silver Angel the Player Characters could sneak into a facility by dressing themselves in "hazard suits" and pretending to be hazardous materials transporters.
• Champions
  • In the adventure "What Rough Beast", the characters can find and use radiation suits against the deadly radiation field given off by the monster.
  • Supplement PRIMUS and DEMON. PRIMUS agents have radiation suits available.
• GURPS has NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits.
• Terminator Armors from Warhammer 40,000, the most powerful and durable suits of Power Armor ever developed by the Imperium of Man, were originally hazmat suits. For maintenance work inside plasma reactors, while the reactor's running at full capacity.
• The Vile Savants from Dark Heresy are daemonic entities that take the form of a hazmat suit filled to the brim with pestilent filth and evil, diseased maggots. They fight with rusty, contaminated surgical equipment, and their speech sounds like distorted medical chatter punctuated by screams and moans of pain and horror.
• Turn up sometimes in the post-apocalyptic RPG Gamma World.
• Traveller has Hostile Environment Vacc Suits, which are suitable for any environment from the vacuum of space to the crushing depths of the ocean floor. And Battle Dress has the same protections.

Toys

• The Airfix USAF Personnel figure set, depicting American Air Force ground personnel of all types, includes several emergency personnel wearing WW2-era Hazmat suits.
• Playmobil, creators of small figures in roles varying from SWAT cop to a fairy and unicorn, once released a HAZMAT Crew playset.
• G.I. Joe:
  • Hasbro released a line of "Eco-Warriors" in the 80's, back when environmentalism was cool. The villains, known as "Toxo-Vipers", fought inside bulky, leaky, cut-rate hazmat gear to protect themselves from their hazardous waste-based weaponry.
  • And when the leaky suits got to be too much, the Toxo-Vipers would turn into Toxo-Zombies, who were wearing the suits less for protection and more to hold their bodies together.
  • The idea continued in Generation 3 with the orange-suited Hazard-Vipers.
  • The comic book states that the Joes' Eco-Warrior suits are made from recycled action figures.
• LEGO Minifigures has Hazmat Guy, a neurotic sanitation worker who deals with the likes of Mutagenic Goo on a daily basis.

Video Games

• The puzzle adventure game Hazmat Hijinks is centered around wearing hazmat suits of different colors and using them to overcome various nuclear, chemical, and biological dangers.
• Keep Out: The humans at the gas station are all wearing these.
• Left 4 Dead 2: one type of Uncommon Infected wears Hazmat Suit, which protects the Infected from fire.
  Nick: Guess those suits don't stop bites.
• In Metal Slug 4, the Hazmat Suit Soldiers from Amadeus Syndicate can toss biological grenades which turns people into zombies and mummies.
• Skyland 1976: Some enemies in the game wear these, the game being set in a top secret government facility and all.
• Team Fortress series:
  • Team Fortress Classic first had the pyro in a proper hazard suit, in contrast to the Quake mod version's flame-pattern uniform and sunglasses. As with TF2 later on, pyros are immune to the secondary damage of enemy pyros, but can still be killed from the direct damage itself.
  • Team Fortress 2 again has the pyro, and again has immunity to the afterburn of fire weapons. Cosmetically, there's also the Pyro's HazMat Headcase and the Medic's Das Hazmattenhatten.
• Subverted with Half-Life's iconic H.E.V. suit; initially presented as a hazmat suit, it's actually more of a Powered Armor. Cue WMG over whether it's simply overengineered for its intended purpose or Black Mesa deliberately designed it for the military.
  • It's even referenced by the G-man before his hibernation.
  Gordon Freeman, in the flesh - or rather in the hazard suit. I took the liberty of relieving you of your weapons. Most of them were government property. As for the suit, I think you earned it.
  • For the military (the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit, at least) they made a compatible variant with slightly different functionality — the PCV.
• Various hazmat suits can be worn in the Fallout series, which are pretty useful considering the games are set in a post-nuclear wasteland.
  • Fallout Tactics has the Environmental Armor, which is a modified armored hazmat suit. While it is very effective at protecting the wearer against radiation and poison, it also kills the wearers peripheral vision and has a perception penalty. It is also one of the very few armor that can be worn by ghoul recruits.
  • Fallout 3's radiation suit unfortunately offers only 30%-40% radiation resistance... and thanks to the way the game handles radiation, you can still die from standing in a radioactive puddle.
  • Fallout: New Vegas adds the Hazmat suit; unfortunately, the suit combined with a certain chemical cloud lead to some rather unfortunate results.
  • Fallout 4 has a Hazmat Suit which gives complete protection from radiation, more or less necessary to explore the Glowing Sea, but no Damage Resistance at all. You can find one in Hugo's Hole, which is very radioactive. Reaching the suit is left as an exercise for the player. Another location you can find the suits is in the Four Leaves Chem Factory, where the Ghoul workers can be seen wearing them while attacking you.
• Homer, one of the bosses from Gekido is a flamethrower-wielding brute wearing a yellow Hazmat suit.
• Halo: The HAZOP armor is noted to utilize a specialized material that helps protect the user from heightened exposure to radiation that normal Mjolnir suits cannot. However, in actual gameplay, the armor is only for aesthetics.
• Saints Row 2:
  • There's a scene where a guy was denying a leak in the nuclear power plant, while wearing a suit. The Boss can buy their own copy of the outfit at the Let's Pretend store.
  • The Trail Blazing Activity has you wear a fire-proof suit while riding a Toad four-wheeler. It's a checkpoint rally where you earn extra time by running into people and vehicles, setting them on fire (and causing the latter to explode). If you complete all six levels of it at both locations, you unlock the suit in your wardrobe, which makes the Boss immune to fire when all its pieces are worn.
• Doom: You can find them in certain levels. They allow you to walk through toxic waste without any harm for a limited time. They also protect you from other hazards like lava and boiling blood.
• The concept exists in the Resident Evil games, but it's never used much.
  • A note in the first game indicates that such suits were worn briefly after the start of the outbreak.
  • Suits can be seen hanging up in laboratories in the Outbreak and Dead Aim spin-offs and in Code: Veronica.
  • A researcher in a hazmat suit is brutally smashed against unbreakable glass in Code: Veronica.
  • One hazmat zombie appears in Dead Aim.
• The S.I.N. scientists in the background of the Street Fighter IV Secret Laboratory and Crumbling Laboratory levels wear hazmat suits. They seem more focused at cheering on the fighters than they are at actually keeping the laboratory working.
• You have these in Sheltered, which should be put on the family members before they go outside of the shelter.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl has a few of these, worn by scientists and player characters who expect to go into high-radiation areas. The most obvious are the Scientist Suits, which are not so good as body armor, but they are superb at protecting from radiation or toxins. Even most regular kinds of armor has some characteristics of this, and given the environmental hazards of The Zone, it is a significant factor in choosing what kind of protection to wear.
• Dead Space has the 'RIG', a Powered Armor suit that protects against hazardous gases, vacuum and undead co-workers. It also features build in gravity boots and a holographic projector.
  • Unfortunately the sequels suits have an embarrassing weakness ... they can be breached by a crazy person holding a screwdriver.
• One level in Call of Duty: Black Ops consists of a shootout in a town covered in clouds of a chemical agent, so everyone's wearing one of these even while trying to kill each other. Visibility is next to nil, your vision is warped by your suit's faceplate, and while the rest of the game uses Regenerating Health, your suit can only take a finite amount of damage before failing.
• Deus Ex offers them. Alas, the one in the tutorial doesn't work without a patch.
• These show up in the Marathon Infinity scenario Rubicon. Their appearance is one of the first clues we get that the work the Dangi Corp. is involved in might not be all beneficial to mankind.
• James Bond Everything or Nothing has this as a "bad guy" fashion, most prominently in "The Machinery of Evil." In a bit of character-recycling, you'll sometimes see them in funny background events at Q's lab.
• The Glue Gunner monkey in Bloons Tower Defense starts wearing one once you upgrade his glue to corrosive glue and/or once his glue starts splashing.
• Some mooks in the first Soldier of Fortune wear these, with backpack tanks that explode when shot.
• Command & Conquer: Renegade's Flamethrowers and Chemical Warriors wear suits which are highly resistant against the very weapons they wield against their opponents. Chemical Warriors get bonus points because those suits were originally meant to keep them safe while they work in lovely fields of Toxic Green Rocks that the story calls "Tiberium".
• An upgrade to all USA infantrymen in Command & Conquer: Generals. It's unique in that it doesn't No-Sell the damage from fallout zones and biochemical contaminant puddles, it just upgrades their resistance to them.
• One of your science minions, the biochemist, in Evil Genius wears on of these constantly as his character design; given that one of the research tools consists of various tanks of dangerous chemicals and biochemist minions are the best at operating them, is a Justified Trope.
  • Amusingly enough they still take off the helmet when manning the kitchen, resulting in a very small head sticking out of a very bulky suit.
• The Division: The Hazmat Suit, available in the Hazmat Gear Set, increases the player's overall resistance to viral contamination when equipped.
• Find the Cure! has the Arc Flash suit.
• In System Shock, you can find environmental protection suits that can protect against radiation and biological contamination. The first version protects only against radiation hazards, reducing your exposure to one-quarter as long as you have power for it, while the second version adds biological protection at the same rate. You're never required to get either version, but given that you will be required to roam around the highly radioactive reactor chamber and the horribly contaminated Beta Grove, you'll probably want them. SHODAN's room on the Bridge is also heavily irradiated. The remake changes these to semi-experimental "hazard field generators", that are worn like a backpack and use an energy shield to protect you. They work just fine, but they were designed to replace the full enviro-suits; due to SHODAN's machinations, the suits were disposed of before enough generators were available, resulting in a lot of sickness and death.
  • In System Shock 2, the hazmat suit is an equippable armor. It offers no protection against weapons damage, but it reduces damage from toxic and electrical sources by 75%.
• The quarians in Mass Effect series spend nearly all their lives wearing biosuits that protect them against the outside environment, including underpressure and any sort of matter, since spending several generations aboard mostly sterile spaceships has severely atrophied their immune systems. These biosuits, however, are much more form-fitting than many other hazmat suits.
• Crops up as a cosmetic item in The Secret World. Within the plot, CDC researcher Marianne Chen is always dressed in one of these, having ended up stranded less than twenty feet from a huge lake of liquid Filth; however, it's quickly revealed that the Filth penetrates the suit with ridiculous ease, and the rest of Marianne's team has ended up either infected or dead for this very reason. In reality, she's only bothering with the suit for defense against airborne agents - and for the sake of her own peace of mind - and given that she's been wearing it for the last few days, she freely acknowledges just how uncomfortable it is. Also, in an unusual twist for a sympathetic character, her visor is completely opaque and her face is never seen at any point.
• Fortnite has the Epic skins, Toxic Trooper (male) and Toxic Agent (female) that are form-fitting hazmat suits.
• Miscreated: You can make your character wear a hazmat suit.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: Worn by... well, someone (the faceplate appears to be a one-way mirror)... in the cutscene that plays whenever an Alien Autopsy is carried out, narrated by Dr. Vahlen.
  • XCOM 2 has a basically similar cutscene, but since you're La Résistance now Dr. Tygan has to make do with a respirator, goggles and rubber gloves.
• The Dead Mines: The player character didn't bring one of these when entering an abandoned mine filled with toxic gas, and openly laments this decision as the gas gets worse. In the end, it leads to his death.
• Joumee The Hedgehog: You can have Joumee wear a haz-mat suit.
• LEGO Stunt Rally: Radium wears a yellow haz-mat suit, tying into his nuclear motif.
• Starbound has a hazmat suit, whose components can usually be found on planets orbiting radioactive stars. Since it's a vanity set, it doesn't really do anything.
• Flamethrower marines in Aliens vs. Predator: Extinction wear the "Apesuit" from Alien³, which here is a fireproof suit intended to keep them from burning themselves on their own guns, but is also acid-proof (which coincidentally also makes them Facehugger-proof), which is why the xenomorph containment crew were wearing them in the movie.

Webcomics

• Irregular Webcomic!: in the Espionage theme's retelling of Dr. No, No and Bond both wear LEGO radiation suits, which made the strips tricky to shoot because David Morgan-Mar only had one radiation suit, or so he thought.
• Gunnerkrigg Court: We never find out what exactly Zimmy's science fair entry is, but men in hazmat suits are called in to dispose of it, in spite of Zimmy's protests that it's not dangerous.
• In Kevin & Kell, Ralph wears one when talking to fire ants. One of the few times that a non-human in K&K has covered feet.
• Several comics from The Petri Dish have characters wearing protective suits. They do work in a lab, after all.
• In Tiffany and Corey, Corey wears one when bringing a sick Tiffany her medicine.

Web Original

• Homestar Runner: The Strong Bad Email "couch patch" has the Poopsmith wearing a hazmat suit with the words "Has Matt?" on it.

Western Animation

• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Cutie Pox", upon learning of a case of Cutie Pox, some citizens of Ponyville are quick to clad themselves in these (complete with a radiation warning symbol over the wearer's cutie mark).
  • Rarity dons one while attempting to capture vampire fruit bats in "BATS!". Good thing, too, as the helmet successfully protects her from the splatter of being struck by an overripe apple and the vampire fruit bat that tries to lick it off, in a scene that may leave older viewers with flashbacks◊ to Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong.. (wearing one while clearing a real-life bat infestation is highly recommended, if only because bat guano is extremely nasty.)
• Done in John R. Dilworth's early cartoon, "Dirty Birdy", where one of the Amusing Injuries done on the mooning cross-eyed bird by the impatient blue cat is put on a hazmat suit and dunk him in a vat of radioactive green waste which causes him to disappear. He got better of course.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: Eustace wore one in "The Demon in the Mattress". It failed to protect him from getting possessed by a demon.
• An episode of Tiny Toon Adventures had a group of villagers besieged by Wile E. Coyote Expy bandits, before the timely arrival of Buster and his friends. One of the punishments dished out on the dastardly bunch is giving them a Fire-Breathing Diner of chili so spicy that one of the villagers serving it wears a hazmat suit to exaggerate the effect.
• Worn by Sid in Hey Arnold! when he develops an excessive fear of germs after watching a hygiene film.
• The Simpsons:
  • Worn by Homer Simpson from time to time as part of his job as a safety inspector in Mr. Burn's nuclear power plant. This is seen in the old and new intro theme.
  • Or, in "Bart on the Road", as a convenient place so that Lisa can't hear him swear himself into the next century after learning Bart is driving a car.
  • Homer also wore one in "Milhouse of Sand and Fog" when wheeling in Maggie during her "pox party" because he never had chicken pox.
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror XXXIV" segment "Lout Break", the only individuals shown not succumbing to the Homerizing infection who are not related to Homer wear these, including Professor Frink, his team of scientists, and Moe (who wears a more improvised one than Frink to serve the Homerfied Springfielders flooding his bar). Frink's suit getting breached by Homer is what ultimately dooms the human race.
• Worn by Kane's men and Mike in Motorcity during the Zombie Apocalypse in "Going Dutch." Also the Safe-T Suit in "Off the Rack."
• Danny Phantom: the title character (in ghost form and a few seconds before the accident that gave him his powers), Maddie, and Jack are seen wearing them. Well, Jack and Maddie for the whole series actually!
• When testing the "n-ray" in Futurama Professor Farnsworth dons a hazmat suit, after assuring the rest of the crew that they'd only need safety goggles.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Blue Shadow Virus" Padme and Jar Jar don hazmat suits while investigating the Sepratist lab working to revive the deadly virus. In "Mystery of a Thousand Moons" Padme's suit is damaged during a confrontation with Sepratist droids and she is infected with the virus.
• In the Batman/Superman crossover "World's Finest", Superman wears a lead-lined suit resembling a hazmat suit to protect himself against the lode of Kryptonite the Joker is proffering to him. It works fine until the Joker remembers his boutonniere that squirts acid.
• Hazmat suits in Cataclysm are encumbering and not terribly effective against zombie claws and teeth, but stop radiation, acid, and electricity.

Real Life

• According to OSHA, HAZMAT suits are rated in four levels, from most protective to least. Level A suits are completely sealed, fluid- and gas-tight with self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA, a/k/a tanked air). Level B suits also use an SCBA, but are only fluid-tight (gases can enter and escape the suit). Level C uses the Level B suit with a powered air filtering respirator instead of a self-contained breather. Level D is just regular work clothing.
• The Plague Doctor outfit worn in France and Italy during Black Death epidemics in the 17th century makes this trope Older Than They Think. It consisted of thick leather gloves and boots, heavy oilcloth cloak and pants covering the whole body, and the iconic "bird-man" mask which gave rise to one of the most popular Venetian masks around, the eponymous medico della peste. The mask included the goggles covering the eyes and aromatic herbs in the beak, that supposedly warded off the plague "miasma" and certainly masked the stench of decaying bodies and leaking buboes of the patients. This costume worked up to a point, since practically none of the user's skin was exposed while wearing it, so the risk of being bitten by plague-carrying fleas was much lower. The waxed material meant the fleas couldn't even grip onto the doctor inside. On the other hand, the wearers didn't understand the importance of regular decontamination and quarantine procedures or equipment cleaning and maintenance, so the exteriors of the suits built up all sorts of nastiness that could not only transfer to patients as you went about your day, but which you could pick up yourself by taking the clothes off and/or sleeping in the same room as them. And, then there was whatever the interiors of the masks could build up without regular scrubbing. Just hope you don't mind, say, mould spores... In short, plague doctors did drop like flies during prolonged epidemics. But, not necessarily simply because of Yersinia pestis; anthrax spores regularly crop up in plague pits stemming from epidemics linked to the Black Death, for example. The mask would do little about that particularly hardy danger.
• Ironically, asbestos firesuits turned out to be hazardous in themselves as the very material protecting firefighters threatened to kill them in the longer term with incurable and deadly asbesteosis and mesothelioma.
  • Hence why nomex and kevlar are favoured today, though in some fields, such as volcanology, the above-pictured silver-coloured (actually made of aluminium) suit. Jamie Hyneman likes it in there, it's private.
• Inverted with the cleanroom suit (often known in computer-chip factories as a 'bunny-suit') whose purpose is to keep dust and such on the wearer from contaminating what they're handling.
• When treating deadly contagious diseases like Ebola, medical hazmat suits are a must. Unfortunately, they also limit one's vision as well as one's hearing not just with the muffling of the ears, but also the constant noisy rustling of the material (plus or minus the noise from your air regulator or powered respirator). Furthermore, they are stifling hot to wear, especially in those African hot zones, and they have to be taken off very carefully in precisely prescribed methods lest the wearer become infected themselves by the contaminates on the suits.
  • Part of the reason for a "buddy system" in CBRNE operations is the need to decontaminate each other at the end of the operation. If you're the only suited operator, and you strip off your gear willy-nilly, you yourself will now require decontamination, and there's no one suited up to decon you.
  • In the most critical times of the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2020 in some countries, the luckiest health workers were equipped with suits resembling these. The least lucky had to make do with much less protective gear ^note often consisting of little more than a homemade cloth mask covering the nose and mouth, and many caught the disease as a result. Though by 2021, industries had ramped up production of protective gear so that most hospitals were much better equipped than they were a year earlier.
• One of the reasons modern firefighters and hazmat team specialists are often extremely fit and badass is that their training involves heavy exercises while wearing the entire hazmat suit, often with the gasmask attached. Often the exercise includes the donning of the suit and is timed. A major part of hazmat suit training is the discipline to refrain from adjusting the suit after donning it correctly.
• Sometimes used by nuclear workers dealing with alpha emitters like uranium, plutonium, and radon and with beta emitters like strontium-90 that you do not want to inhale or get in your body. Radiologists use lead lined garments to block X-rays. For gamma and neutron emitters, shielding needs to be heavier than a person can move in.

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