Glow Lanterns for Pools with Balloons and Glow Sticks

"Fill a balloon with a glow stick, then inflate! Makes a cool pool lantern!" 

If there is one thing I've learned, it's to be very skeptical of any "glow in the dark" project you find on pinterest. From plant pots to stepping stones, its usually not going to be anything like the image promises.

This is another case of such a project. Fill a balloon with a glowstick, inflate, and have a quick easy beautiful floating lantern, great for late night pool parties and such.

Unfortunately once again that's NOT what this is an image of. Its of an actual product called The Flat Ball Light. At over $200 a pop, that's not quite the easy thrifty item most people are looking for for their home parties.

So what DOES the DIY version look like? Over at the blog Life in the Wylde West, she tested the pin out herself. The results?

Glow Stick Balloons | Life in the Wylde West

Yeah, not impressive. At all. You're better off buying actual LED pool lights (there are cheaper options out there besides the $200 flat lights) but as long as you know what you're getting yourself into, your kids might still get a bit of a kick out the project.

(Yet Another) Mountain Dew Glow Stick Hoax

"How to make a homemade glow stick - baking soda, mountain dew, peroxide, starbursts, and dish soap"

This takes the original hoax of making Mountain Dew glow and adds even more pointless items. I honestly started laughing when they added two Starbursts, as if somehow a mixture of gelatin, HFCS, and red dye is going to aid in this. In case you're curious, you can see the video here: 

Just like in our last post about the ever popular Mountain Dew Glow Stick, the basic idea is you add certain things to the Mountain Dew (notice how both video has the use of peroxide in them? We'll come back to that in a bit.) and after a bit of shaking, it glows, just like a glow stick. Why? Well what they don't show you is the contents in the bottle; in both videos the bottle already contain some liquid, which is generally believed to be Mountain Dew. In all likelihood however, it's probably a nice mixture of glow stick chemicals. Once the peroxide is added (which is also used in glow sticks, that is what is in the glass vial you break to activate them) it starts to glow. You can read a step by step guide in making your own glow sticks over at Wikihow (with actually glow stick chemicals), which again, uses peroxide. 

Glow Sticks and Nail Polish

"break a glow stick & put in clear polish" 

With Halloween coming up I've been seeing a lot more Glow in the Dark pins then you usually see. However as we learned with our other glow stick pins, not only will this not work, it's probably not the best thing for you. Not only that, glow stick formula typically doesn't glow that long once it's exposed to air. I was going to test this out and see how long it will glow, and if it would even set up properly but alas, I'm out of glow sticks. Even if it did set up right (instead of leaving your nails a big glowing gooby mess, which is what I think would happen) the glow would only last a short time, then you're left with a funky colored bottle of nail polish.

Instead, just buy glow-in-the-dark nail polish. A quick search not only pulls up a lot of different companies and online vendors that sell it, they also use the same exact image as the Pinterest pin! But I'd also like to point out that even with retail glow in the dark nail polish, without a blacklight you will not get the effect depicted here. That's not your standard glow-in-the-dark glow. 

Any fans out there with a spare bottle of nail polish and glow sticks want to test this out for me? I'm honestly really curious if it will even set up and harden right. 

Glow in the Dark Bubbles

"Cut open glow sticks & pour them into bubble solution. Glow in the dark bubbles. I like the idea for summer nights & camping"

Who hasn't seen this idea going around not just Pinterest but Facebook and the like? Looking at the picture, this looks like this would be true. And it is, sort of. You see, you CAN add glow stick formula to bubbles easy enough. The problem comes in that even though the bottle of bubbles does glow, the bubbles themselves? Not so much. At all really. First off - that photo? It's a photo of "Miracle Bubbles Glow Fusion" bubbles, which you can buy retail, not of someone DIYing glow in the dark bubbles. How do I know this? the bottle shape. Here's the source of the image above (flickr) 

For this post I decided to buy the glow bubbles shown above instead of DIYing it. I really dislike cutting open glowsticks for a couple of reasons; the smell alone that lingers is awful and being not quite summer, I didn't want that smell lingering in my house from bubbles. They come with two packs of activators - I'm not having a lot of luck with finding what is in these pouches, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's the same, if not similar formula used in glow sticks. We decided to do this on the last day of spring break, as a sort of kiddie rave party for our kids. We waited until dark and turned out all the lights and pulled the drapes closed to make the house as dark as possible for this, then crank up some electronica music and mixed the bubbles with the activators.

no joke, this isn't just a black square.
I promise it's an actual photo.

Over to the left you can see two photos I took of our party. I'm not joking, the first one is really a photo taken without the flash, the second one with a flash on. So the bubbles don't glow when you blow them. I didn't figured they would, due to surface mass and tension and all that, but when they landed and popped? That was a whole different story. I tried to get a good photo of it, as it looked like the most beautiful milky way space image but I wasn't able to quite capture it with my camera. 

See? Bubbles!

 Which brings up another issue with this: I would HIGHLY recommend using this either outdoors, or in a house with hardwood floors. Everything by the end was covered in glowing solution.  Luckily we had the hindsight to roll up the area rug and do this in our entrance room so it wouldn't get on the sofa in the living room, but the kids still needed a good bath when it was done with.

So all in all, as fun as this is, don't expect to have literally glow in the   dark bubbles. It doesn't matter how dark you get the place (as shown in the photo there to the left) these bubbles just aren't going to GLOW like you want them to. It was still fun though, and something we plan to do again maybe this summer - but outdoors this time, as I don't feel like hosing down the kids and mopping floors so late at night. 

Glowing Mountain Dew

"For camping or late nights at the beach? Leave 1/4 of Mountain dew in bottle (just don't drink it all), add a tiny bit of baking soda and 3 caps of peroxide. Put the lid on and shake - voila! Homemade glow stick (bottle) solution."

Ah yes, the infamous glowing Mountain Dew pin. I've referred to it before in previous posts and have received a few people asking about it. It's not being pinned as much as it was some time back, but I still see it pinned a couple times a day in my feed. It's source is a Youtube video which can be seen here. 

But can you mix a just a pinch of baking soda and a dash or two of peroxide and get glowing Dew? 

No. It's a hoax. My honest guess as to how it was done after watching the video is that they added the same chemicals found in glow sticks to the bottle, and when the peroxide was added it caused the same reaction as it would if you 'break' a glow stick (remember - the glass insert in glowsticks contains peroxide as well!) it formed a reaction and volva! "Glowing Mountain Dew!"

I think one of the reasons this keeps getting pinned time after time, despite there even being a Snopes.com article about it, is this pin offers a little entertainment and horror. The horror that something people commonly drink could glow (and let's face it, Mountain Dew is already a pretty horrific shade of day-glo green) but also that this is something we could pull out at the beach, at a BBQ, at home and impress our friends and family with. But unless you plan on doing the same as they did in the video by adding glow stick chemicals, it's not going to glow, or impress anyone. 

Glow Stick Xylophone

"Glow stick xylophone. Put the glow sticks in cups of water and an aura comes off in the dark, when you tap them. Probably the coolest thing ever."

Ah yes, another glow stick pin. Sadly, short of taking illegal drugs, this isn't going to work. It doesn't work that way. 

Kuro! : joo0ey

It's just the effect of long light exposure from her camera, nothing more. Long light exposure is how they get all of those really fun photos you can find everywhere online, like this one on the left. It's done by adjusting settings on your camera. SLRs are recommended but modern day click and point digital cameras can also do this. The real trick is making sure you have a tripod or something completely stable to set your camera on, switch your camera over to manual mode and then messing with the shutter speed of your camera. There's a lot of great how to guides online, but I've found it's best to have fun, go out and do it yourself. I have even written about a great "How to use your camera" blog post on a previous Good Idea Friday, which you can find here.

In fact, if you actually click over to the website where the image comes from, she even states "The aura is just an effect from the camera" So, what does the glow sticks in a cup of water really look like? 

Glow stick water cups : Play At Home Mom LLC

So there you go - still kinda fun and neat, a great play item for the kidos on a rainy evening, but nothing special, no auras, no glowing tubes of light shooting out of the glasses.

Glow in The Dark Steps for Halloween

"Mix powdered laundry detergent (containing phosphors) with a little water and splatter on your doorstep. Then, switch your porch lights to black light bulbs and your steps will glow!"

Interesting. This image has made the rounds of pinterest but often times with the idea of cutting open glow sticks and dumping them down your stairs, so I'll go ahead and post about why both glow sticks and laundry detergent is a bad idea. 

As I mentioned in my previous glow stick post - glow sticks don't work that way. The writer at Pintology tried this out using glow sticks, and as you can see her results were on par with my last glow stick test - glow stick liquid just doesn't last, and isn't as bright as the original image from pinterest. Here is where I would also like to point out that the original image isn't taken at night - so that is some pretty strong day-glo green they have going on there on the steps. 

So what about laundry detergent like the pin suggests? Yes and No. Yes, certain laundry soaps can glow under black light. The problem comes about by what it IS that makes it glow - phosphorus. It can be in everything from laundry detergent to dishwashing soap, but more and more companies are straying from using it in their products? Why? 

Because it's REALLY bad for the environment. In fact it's already banned in 16 states. 

From Wikipedia: 

"A more profound problem arises from the heavy use of sodium triphosphate, which can comprise up to 50% by weight of detergents. The discharge of soluble phosphates into natural waters has led to problems with eutrophication, or the growth of living things, of lakes and streams, often where it is not desirable. The replacement of sodium triphosphate by zeolites offers some relief to this problem. With respect to the phosphate additives, between 1940 and 1970 "the amount of phosphates in city wastewater increased from 20,000 to 150,000 tons per year." With an increase in phosphates, especially in the absence of species feeding upon algae, algal blooms grow splendidly on the excess phosphorus and can produce toxins, killing fish, dolphins and plants. They can also indirectly cause oxygen depletion at greater depths, through microbial breakdown of dead algal cells."

So why would you be adding this to your STEPS? That can be easily washed away, into your yard, soaking into ground water, washing away into city water systems? Even if you live in an area where phosphates haven't been banned yet so you can still even BUY soap that contains it, why would you want to willing add something like this to your yard - which is where it would end up once you hosed it off.

So back to the glow stick idea - now you're thinking maybe you could just cut up a LOT of glow sticks and try this.. well guess what makes glow sticks glow? It's a nice little mixture of hydrogen peroxide and phenol. What's phenol? Oh, just a chemical found in everything from BPA to paint stripper -

"Phenol and its vapors are corrosive to the eyes, the skin, and the respiratory tract. Repeated or prolonged skin contact with phenol may cause dermatitis, or even second and third-degree burns. Inhalation of phenol vapor may cause lung edema. The substance may cause harmful effects on the central nervous system and heart, resulting in dysrhythmia, seizures, and coma.The kidneys may be affected as well. Long-term or repeated exposure of the substance may have harmful effects on the liver and kidneys." There is no evidence that phenol causes cancer in humans. Besides its hydrophobic effects, another mechanism for the toxicity of phenol may be the formation of phenoxyl radicals" 

I'm honestly a bit skeptical that this image is even of glow sticks or soap - if you look at it it's too well done, too bright, and clearly not taken at night or with the usual hue that a black light would give off. I believe (and I'm unable to find the source of the image to verify) that this is simply steps painted up with day-glo paint.

So all in all - Bad idea all around. Don't do this. Don't pin.

Glow Sticks Lanterns

"Break open a glow stick, dump it in a jar, shake it up and you have an instant glow stick lantern! Perfect for outdoor parties. Could keep a few of these around for when the power goes out...fun in the dark"

This is one of those pins that verges on true, but misses the mark. The sheer amount of crazy glow stick pins is overwhelming, so I figured I'd start with the easiest - can you cut open a glow stick, dump it into a jar and get an easy lantern?

Sort of. Before trying this myself I read up a bit on it. The biggest complaint about this was that it didn't last long - something about the chemicals of glow sticks exposed to open air causes them to fad far quicker than if you leave them in the tube. 

So I decided to try it myself -  I wanted to see if it would glow well enough to replace candles and battery powered lanterns if the power went out, and just how long it would last. 

A quick trip to the dollar store and I had a fist full of glow sticks to play with. Now here is where I'd like to also mention that despite the fact glow sticks are labeled NON TOXIC, that doesn't mean breaking them open doesn't come with risks. and it's tricky to break them open - you basically have to cut one end, aim it towards the container, and then cut the other end to break the suction so it will flow freely into the container. There is a great article on the safety of glow sticks on Steve Spangler's blog, which you can read here. 

Despite knowing I shouldn't get this on my skin, it was a pain to try to get the liquid out and yes, some splattered on my skin and shirt. As fun as it was to look like an old school raver, it really did burn my skin a bit. Not eating away the skin or anything, but for sure you shouldn't be having young children do this project.

And there we have it - my jar. You can't really tell, but that is a tiny jar - about 3" inches total in size. I couldn't help myself and had to place it next to a dental casting I have because creepy is fun. 

But would this work if the power went out? Uh.. no. Not unless you feel like breaking open a LOT of glow sticks. Here's a photo I took midway into the room of the jar:

Yeah.. that's not lighting a whole lot of anything there. But hey, what about just using it for fun party or Halloween decorations? Well, I failed a bit at tracking the time on how long they last, as I figured it was late and I was tired, so I took a quick hour long nap. When I woke, I asked my husband where my jar was. "It's where you left it silly" ... oh. After just an hour the jar had already stopped glowing. So unless you're planning on a rather quick party, these aren't going to last the whole night through. The other glow sticks we had cracked for fun were still going strong though, and lasted about 4 hours before I went to bed.

All in all, though you can break open a glow stick and dump it in a jar, it's not going to last long, and it's sure not going to help when the power is out. You'd have better time just leaving it all IN the stick and playing with those.