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.
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