Light 08: Day-Glo Colors

Welcome to the 2023 Advent Calendar, which this year is just a list of things that light up all pretty. Previous entries are here. If you enjoy this and want to encourage me to bang more things out on a keyboard, consider supporting my Patreon, or sending something off of my Christmas list. If you'd rather support my spoiled pets, their Ratmas list is here. If you want to spend money but not on me, you can direct your donations to Mainely Rat Rescue, who handles rescue and foster operations for rats, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, and other small mammals in the New England area, or the MSPCA, where my critters got their medical care before I found a good exotics vet, and where I picked up Koda and Yogi. 

Enjoy your trip through the cavalcade of things that go blinky-blink in the dark!

Those of us who were alive in the late '80s and early '90s remember some of the questionable fashion choices we made at the time. One of the biggest, and hardest to explain, was Day-Glo -- those t-shirts and socks in neon colors that were brighter than bright, especially outside in the sunlight. They were loud, dazzling, and never photographed quite right, making it unfortunately difficult to warn the younger generation of our sartorial blunders.

The reason Day-Glo is so hard to capture on camera is that they weren't kidding. These colors literally do glow. The blinding glare is achieved by combining super-bright hues with pigments that fluoresce under certain wavelengths of ultraviolet light. They all react under sunlight -- hence the "Day" part of the name -- and many of them react to the near-UV leaked by industrial fluorescent lights. The bloom is hard to catch on traditional film, but easy to see in person. If you're brave enough, you may have better luck with a phone camera, most of whose sensors react to UV, and many of whose filters are cheap and inadequate.

Day-Glo Color Corp is still around and still creating these colors for use in paint, ink, clothing, cosmetics, and plastics. Their specialty is the ominously-named "DGP-20", the quintessential creepy Halloween green, that glows both under UV and (after some charging time) in the dark.