I was walking in the park when I passed by a woman who wore the most shocking neon pink shirt, it stood out so much. And this made me think, if white clothes don’t stand out despite being the brightest colour (people wearing white clothes in the park didn’t trigger my attention), why did the pink clothes stand out? What factors could be at play?
The park has a lot of grass and bushes, so maybe my eyes were so used to seeing green during my walk, and devoid of red, that the instant I saw a shade of red, triggered the red cones more strongly?
Did the neon pink stand out because maybe humans are gravitated to notice shades of red easily, as ancient humans may have needed to spot for berries and blood?
Perhaps it could have been my biases, at just noticing a colour that is different than what the other people in the park have been wearing?
Maybe fluorescent clothes do glow slightly, like how glow in the dark paints work? It was 6:30 pm so the sun was setting, but it wasn’t dark or anything. So this is unlikely.
I’d love to hear an explanation (but please explain simply, as if I am 5)
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It’s because of fluorescence precisely, not brightness. They are absorbing and reflecting ultraviolet, as well as regular visible light, making them seem more intense to the eye. They’re converting ordinary invisible light into visible light.
You are used to white clothes and other white objects. Bright pink is less common.
> Maybe fluorescent clothes do glow slightly, like how glow in the dark paints work?
That’s possible in principle but it’s negligible unless you have a strong source of ultraviolet light and/or almost no visible light. Sunlight, especially around sunset, isn’t doing anything there.
Most colored items are only able to reflect back the visible light shined upon them. A fluorescent colored item is able to change ultraviolet light into visible light which you can see, and it makes the item appear brighter. You can test this by taking a fluorescent item into a pitch dark room and shining a black light on it, it will appear very bright because the UV light was changed to visible light.
The dyes that the clothes are made with convert frequencies of light that we can’t see, usually ultraviolet, and convert them to frequencies within the visible spectrum. The electrons in the dyes’ molecules are excited by the UV but, because of how they act, prefer to release their excitation energy in two steps, generating lower energy photons in each step.
Basically, they look brighter to our eyes because they really are brighter in the spectrum that we can perceive.
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