Adventures in lighting perception

This afternoon at work, I caught a glimpse of myself in the harsh fluorescent lighting in the bathroom mirror, and it really hit me how much of my hair has turned gray. It looked silvery in the light. And the immediate thought that popped into my head was, “Your hair is so sparkly and silver! It’s magnificent!”

It was nice (and, frankly, astonishing) to have a positive thought about myself as my gut reaction, rather than the usual “here are the many ways that you suck” list.

Also, here is a fun fact that i just learned today: My new bionic eyeballs that I got last year during cataract surgery make it so that I cannot see things glowing under blacklight!

We got a blacklight flashlight today because we have had an incident with cat pee and need to make sure that we have adequately treated all the spots. Y’all know cat pee. It’s the worst and most persistent smell in the world. And it glows under UV light, conveniently.

Anyway, we got this strong blacklight flashlight and Doc was very excited to show it to me when I got home from work. He said that cat food glows under it, weirdly. We went into the bathroom where the food bowl is, turned off the light, and… well, I was underwhelmed. The whole bathroom was bathed in an evenly bright purple color from the flashlight, but nothing was actually glowing. Doc could not understand why I wouldn’t agree that the cat food was glowing. He said, “It’s this bright green-yellow glowing color!” I said, “But it’s not! It’s as dark as the food bowl is!”

Then we went upstairs to look at some of the spots on the carpet where we knew the cat pee was. Again, I could see the whole area bathed in purple from the flashlight, but nothing glowing. He pointed out three specific spots, which to me looked exactly the same as the rest of the carpet. He said incredulously, “You mean you cannot see the spots?!” No, no I could not.

But then… I put on my reading glasses to get a closer look at the carpet. And VOILA! Like magic, the glowing spots appeared.

And then I turned on my phone camera to take a picture, and I could also see the spots through my phone’s camera!

So for some reason, my artificial lenses do not pick up on the glow from blacklight — at least, for some things, and the colors are altered for other things. Later, Doc pointed the light at a yellow post-it-note, which glowed a very bright purple-white with my naked eyes, but glowed yellow-green to him (and yellow-green to me with my reading glasses on). I cannot even pretend to understand why this is happening. I guess blacklight posters are forever ruined for me…

I would 100% have returned this flashlight as “not working as described” if we had not made this discovery.