Monday, September 9, 2013

Glow in the Dark NOT Paint: The Glowing Drink



crazy! it's a glow-in-the-dark aurora borealis cocktail you can actually make!

The more I look around, the more I notice that Pinners adore "glow in the dark" pins.  Glow in the dark paint, glow in the dark fingernail polish, glow in the dark garden stones, glow in the dark planters, glow in the dark bubbles, glow in the dark glitter jars, glow in the dark Mountain Dew. . . You could probably create a pinterest clone site devoted solely to glow in the dark pictures and crafts and it would win the internet.  Especially if it involved glow in the dark cats.

The thing is, most of the glow in the dark pins aren't actually pictures of things that glow in the dark.  The picture above is clearly photoshopped, but that doesn't stop people from hopefully pinning it.  The drink in question, the Aurora Borealis (or Jungle Juice), really does fluoresce under a black light.  In regular light it looks pink, and when the black light comes on it glows blue.



This may be a good time to get into the way certain kinds of luminescence work.  Luminescence is what it's called when something gives off light.  The type of luminescence that Pinners seem to love the most is photoluminescence, which means that matter absorbs energy and then emits light either immediately or as a delayed process.  

When you have a delayed release, you have something that glows in the dark.  Glow in the dark paint and other items slowly let go of the radiation they have absorbed (I'm talking about light here, not nuclear fission), and that energy is seen as visible light.  When the energy is gone, the object stops glowing.  This type of luminescence is called "phosphorescence."

When the glow happens immediately, as soon as you apply the energy (and it disappears pretty much as soon as the energy source is shut off), you have fluorescence.  This is what is happening with the Aurora Borealis drink.  The black light hits the drink and the drink absorbs and then re-emits that radiation.  

So this pin really has a couple of deceptions going on.  First, that any drink you could mix up could look like that picture, and second, classifying a fluorescent drink as "glow in the dark."  Once the black light is off, that drink stops "glowing."  

I just mention this so that people who were not fooled by the photoshop job but who may have fallen for the "glow in the dark" part will know - you can mix up this drink and expose it to bright light all day, and once those lights go out so will the drink.  It needs a black light to work.

No comments:

Post a Comment