Hello, everyone. In this post I'll talk about differences between the main types of glowing tattoos, namely the Uv reactive tattoos (also called blacklight tattoos) and the so-called "glow in the dark tattoos". Blacklight tattoos (also known as UV tattoos) are often confused with the glow-in-the-dark tattoos and there are not few those who try to get a glow-in-the-dark tattoo and get instead a Uv reactive tattoo.
Blacklight tattoos
UV tattoos (blacklight tattoos, ultraviolet tattoos, uv-reactive tattoos, etc) are tattoos made with a special ink that is visible under ultraviolet light (blacklight). Contrary to popular belief, these tattoos DON'T CONTAIN either phospors or phosporus and they DON'T GLOW IN THE DARK. As their name implies, these tattoos don't glow by themselves, their luminosity is caused to REACT to the ultraviolet light (black light). They need a source of black light to glow; if you don't expose them at black light, they WON'T GLOW.
The ink used for the UV-tattoos contains fluorescent substances. Fluorescence is the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. The emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore lower energy, than the absorbed radiation. The most striking examples of fluorescence occur when the absorbed radiation is in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum, and thus invisible to the human eye, and the emitted light is in the visible region (source: wikipedia).
Glow in the dark tattoos
Glow in the dark tattoos are made with phosphorescent ink; as any other phosphorescent substance, the phosphorescent ink needs to be charged with energy by exposure to light; the energy is "stored" for a (relatively) long time (depending on the phosphors used this time can vary from several minutes to several hours) and is slowly released in the form of light; due to this process of absorbing-storing-releasing of the energy, tattoos that contain phosphorescent ink glow in the dark. (read more about the phosphorescent tattoos in this post).
Related posts:
Uv-reactive tattoos and glow-in-the-dark tattoos for the Halloween-party. Are they a good idea or a very bad one? Glow-in-the-dark-tattoos: Phosphorescence / Persistent luminescence / Radioluminescence
