Glowing Waterbeads

You keep using that word...

Glowing waterbeads - these things are so cool and easy to make!

Wow!  A Pin that combines two of my favorite things!  Water beads and claims of glowing when that's not what's happening.

My main beef with this one is the definition of "glowing."  These water beads do not glow in the dark (or anywhere else); they must be activated with a black light, at which point they will look like the picture above.  That doesn't qualify for "glowing."  

For those of you who did not memorize the Aurora  Borealis Drink post:

"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."  

Since these beads require a black light, their reaction is classified as "fluorescence" rather than "phosphorescence," and according to the rules (which I may have made up), only phosphorescence can legally be referred to as "glowing" or "glowing in the dark."

As for how to make these, they're the same water beads from the previous "Water Marbles" post, but instead of using just regular water, or even food coloring in water, these beads are soaked in water that has fluid from a highlighter in it.  

That's it - that's the secret.  You open a highlighter, you mix it with water, and you soak your hydrogel beads in it.  THEN you get a black light, because as you know from using highlighters, they don't glow in the dark.  But they do fluoresce.

Glow Stick Xylophone

Can you paint with all the colors of the glowstick?

So cool! Glow stick xylophone. Put the glow sticks in cups of water and an aura comes off in the dark, when you tap them. Gotta try this!

There's not a whole lot to say about this one.  I mean, if you click through the Pin (which goes to the old version of the blog, but the new version has this disclaimer as well), the author herself states, "THE AURA IS JUST A CAMERA EFFECT!!!!!!"  Yes, in all caps.  Yes, with six exclamation points.  You can feel how tired she is of fielding questions about why someone else's glowstick xylophone didn't work like this.

So it begs the question - when someone read this and pinned it originally, did they just have bad reading comprehension, or did they deliberately mislead everyone by pinning a supercool picture and a pretty ridiculous (but apparently in the realm of "just believable enough") explanation?  I'm aware that the internet is full of trolls, I just didn't expect them to frequent mommy blogs and find pictures like this upon which to wreak their havoc.  

Anyway, as the creator of this picture very correctly asserts, "THE AURA IS JUST A CAMERA EFFECT!!!!!!" so stop bothering her about why your glowstick xylophone didn't shoot up auras upon being played.  

Masks With Glow Sticks

Hint: Not Glow Sticks

masks + glow sticks = great Halloween inspiration

Nope.  Not glow sticks.  It's never glow sticks.  

I feel like Dr. House.  "It's never Lupus."  I mean, how many times has a glow-in-the-dark pin ACTUALLY been done with glow sticks?

This looks like a case of someone either making a bad guess as to how this picture was achieved, or they actually did read through the description and decided that glow sticks would probably work just as well, so they put that in their description.

These masks are being illuminated from within by electric tea lights:

From Craftster

If you want to see how they did it, there's the link.  It's not hard, but it's not glow sticks.  Anyone who looks at the pin should be able to tell by the radiance and color, but you never know what people will believe. 

Someone should try it with glow sticks and post their picture.

Glowing Bubbles

Not to burst your bubble, but this isn't going to yield glowing orbs of soap and glycerin

Cut open glow sticks & pour them into bubble solution. Glow in the dark bubbles. Summer nights here we come!

There are a few reasons why this pin doesn't work as described.  First, some kinds of glow stick solution mixed into bubble solution change the properties of the bubble solution so that you cannot make bubbles with it.  Second, even if you manage to get bubbles, they are unlikely to have enough of the glow solution to make visibly glowing bubbles.  The bubbles are just too thin to contain enough glow solution to appear to the naked eye.

Here's a video of someone attempting to mix a glowstick and bubble solution.  They did get the bubbles to form, but they don't appear to be glowing.   They very well may show up with special photography equipment in a very dark room, but to the naked eye and the camera they used, nothing showed up.  However, the experimenters did note that when the bubbles landed and popped, the pool of solution did glow.

Finally, the picture that is on this pin is NOT of someone dumping an opened glow stick into a jar of bubble solution.  This picture is of someone attempting to use Super Miracle Bubbles® GLOW FUSION™ Bubble Solution.  This product is similar to a glow stick solution, in that you mix the parts together to get a chemical reaction that causes the glow.

However, even this solution, which is designed to create glowing bubbles, failed to produce any visible-in-the-dark bubbles.  Those people had the same experience with the invisible bubbles popping and then the solution from the popped bubble would be concentrated enough for the glow to become visible.

Maybe the best way to get bubbles that you can see in the dark would be to get some highlighters, mix their contents with bubble solution, and blow bubbles under a black light.

Word to the wise - glow sticks have a glass capsule inside of them; this is what you break to release the activator.  If you cut open a glowing stick, you risk also releasing glass shards.  Be careful.

"Glow in the dark" drinks. Again. Moar.

If you drink this, and then go to the bathroom, and there is a black light, what happens?

#glow #drink #spooky #halloween

Glow in the dark drinks

Again with the glowing drinks.  Which don't really "glow in the dark" so much as they fluoresce under black lights.  If this stuff really glowed in the dark, you would NOT want to ingest it.

The secret here is that tonic water (which contains quinine) reacts like this when you hit it with a black light.  That's it.  Oh, and I think that the starts here are Jell-O Jigglers made with tonic water as well.

Tonic water isn't something everyone enjoys - it's bitter.  So if you try this, maybe go easy on the tonic water; it shouldn't take much to get the desired reaction.

Fairies in a Jar

What is diamond glitter, anyway?

How To Make Fairies In A Jar This is something everyone will love you can just imagine the look on your childs face when they see this and its something they will never forget so its worth a little work on this one. FAIRIES IN A JAR DIRECTIONS: 1. Cut a glow stick and shake the contents into a jar. Add diamond glitter 2. Seal the top diy

I love so many things about this one.  The misspellings on the picture, the poor punctuation in the description, the instructions to shake hard. . .It's all comedy gold.

It's kind of strange how this very specific description shows up all over the web.  Try it; Google "something they will never forget so its worth a little work on this one."  It comes up in all sorts of places.

The earliest mention I could find was from May 2012 on KWNR.  Who knows where it came from before that.

Something worth mentioning: Diamond glitter is a specific type of glitter.  Most of the people who have tried to recreate this pin have been using regular glitter.  Diamond glitter is ground glass rather than normal glitter.  Theoretically, ground up pieces of glass would give you more of a sparkly prismatic effect, where the people using regular glitter have wound up with dark spots where their glitter blocks the glowing light.

This may be why the instructions say to "seal" the top of the jar, rather than just "put the lid on."  Yes, glitter is the herpes of the craft world and you don't want it getting out, but if you're doing this with children, probably the last thing you want is a bunch of teeny glass shards and probably-toxic glow stick fluid getting loose on your kids.

Back to the pin.  No matter what kind of glitter you use, you're not getting the result in that picture.  It's a beautiful piece of work, but it's not something you can replicate in real life with a glow stick and some glass dust.

The good news is, there IS a way to make a jar that has little glowing spots in it.  To do it, you need to use glow in the dark paint (and no, not the kind you make by using the liquid from a highlighter - that is not "glow in the dark," that is "fluorescent").  

Check out this tutorial by Panka for a very nice illustration of how this can work.  

Glow in the Dark NOT Paint: The Glowing Drink

Oh My God, It's Full of Stars!

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.

Cocktail Recipes and Mixed Drinks

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.

Glow in the Dark Paint: Part 1 - Path of Glowing Stones

There are a LOT of pins about adding glow in the dark paint to outside features.  Today's post addresses the infamous Glow in the Dark Path.

Glow in the dark path?

Line a pathway with rocks painted in glow in the dark paint. During the day they “charge” in the sun and in the evening they reflect the stored light. Rust-Oleum Glow in the Dark Brush-on Paint.

or

glow stones…..glows at night after soaking up the sun all day omg

It's hard to know where to start with this one.  So many people have pinned it, seeming to believe that these really are stones that have been painted with glow in the dark paint or that maybe these are special glowing stones that are available for purchase.  But you just need to look at this picture to recognize that this effect is not attributable to glow in the dark paint, nor are the rocks glowing from within.  

Look at how the light is focused on each stone.  It's brightest in the center and fades out toward the edges, which if the rocks were glowing from within would make sense.  But then there are the pebbles around each stone, which are showing some spillover illumination.  If that's from the stones, why isn't it consistent around each stone?  And why are those pebbles sometimes brighter than the edges of the stones that they are bordering?

Then, check out the gate and urns at the end of the path.  If these stones are glowing, why is that same "glow" coming off of the gate?  Surely no one believes that the glowing stones are powerful enough to light up that gate.  

And even without that sort of analysis, the color is a dead giveaway.  Glow in the dark paint does not give off this color.  Over at Observations, they did a comparison between the glow in the dark paint from Krylon and Rust-Oleum.  They even delved into the ingredients that cause the glow in the dark effect (Strontium Aluminate and Zinc Sulfide).  Both of those paints (which each use Zinc Sulfide) glow green as they release the energy stored from being exposed to light.  But whether you are using Strontium Aluminate or Zinc Sulfide, it looks like you cannot achieve the warmth in the pinned picture through glow in the dark paints.

It's probably worth mentioning that even if you did want to paint your stones so that they would glow a spooky green for about two hours after sundown, for at least the Rust-Oleum paint, the directions say it's for interior use only.

So how was the picture in the pin achieved?  It's a technique the photographer used called "Painting With Light."  He walked along the path and used a handheld light to "paint" each of the stones, then the fence, then the urns and gate, and finally walked back to the camera to close the shutter.  Because of the way the settings were done, he never appears in the picture - he was moving too quickly to be captured.

The good news for people who do want a glowing pathway is that there are companies that sell glowing stones.  And interestingly enough, one of the pins that has a picture of that glowing path above has the URL to Ambient Glow Technology.  If you go to their Gallery page you can see a set of stepping stones that really do glow in the dark, and per the claim on that page, they will last all night.  Or there is GLOW Stones USA, which has a lovely picture of a driveway incorporating their glow in the dark stones.

Make Your Own Glowstick With Mountain Dew

Leave 1/4 of Mountain dew in bottle, add a tiny bit of baking soda and 3 caps of peroxide. Put the lid on and shake - walla! Homemade glow stick (bottle) solution.

And there's a video showing how to do it, which I cannot embed here because they've disabled that.

This would be so cool if it were true. Unfortunately, it's false. Really false.

You cannot get the glowing effect without dumping the contents of a glowstick in there. Sorry, but Mountain Dew is not magical, and it won't let you make homemade glowstick solution.