Question: What happens when you don’t wear sunblock in the pool?
Experiment: Coat sun-sensitive beads in sunblock, put some in water and some without water in the sun. Also put un-coated beads in water and without to see which change fastest.
Observations: The beads all changed color very quickly. The slowest to change were the ones with sunblock not in water. The sunblock beads in water changed nearly as fast as the ones without sunblock.
Conclusion: Either our sunblock is terrible, or the beads are too smooth to let it stick!
(The other possibility is that our sunblock is not designed to block the UV rays that the beads are sensitive to. Either way, the experiment did not have the startling results we were all expecting.)
However, sun-sensitive beads are fun for other reasons:
Also, these are “SolarActive” brand beads. I also purchased some Darice UV beads in two sizes, to see what the differences between the brands were:
Aside from colors, the Darice brand beads took a looooong time to change to full color. (Maybe we should re-do our experiment with them?)