Cheers Bullet,

Don't think I'm going to bother doing a clean up on the mask at all, it isn't going to be animated (even though if it was it wouldn't be flexible so still wouldn't matter really), will just texture it and move on.
Will most likely do the clean up after as I can't stand leaving a model with bad wires...lol.

Here's a couple of renders I did to test whether it would work without a clean up, and as the mask will be even smaller in the final image I think it'll be okay.