My daughter has a Peppa pig dollhouse and I was looking at it just now, and I can see some of the yellow paint is faded and bleached by the sun. Eli5 where does the colour actually go?
In: 5
The color doesn’t go anywhere. The materials that make up the surface of the object – in your case the dollhouse – become altered so they absorb and reflect different wavelengths of visible light than when they were new. What happens is that the sun’s ultraviolet rays break molecular bonds, changing slightly the composition of the material. These changes tend to fade colors by altering the dyes used to produce the color when the material was new. Some are even altered by heat from the sun (infrared) rather than ultraviolet rays.
The UV light from the sun makes certain colored chemicals turn into slightly different chemicals that don’t have a color.
The other comments are taking about wavelengths and UV light, I’ll keep it simple.
The doll house reflected the Sun’s light in a certain way, which made it appear yellow.
The sunlight carries a lot of energy, and over time that energy changed the way the dollhouse reflects the sunlight, making it appear white.
So the colour didn’t go anywhere, the thing that changed is how the dollhouse reflects the light. It reflected back yellow light, now it reflects white light.
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