Veritasium
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2021
11:13 · 5.6M views · Jul 21, 2018
Veritasium shows what the world looks like through a UV camera. It covers how pigments absorb UV, how fluorescence works, and how UV imaging reveals sunscreen effectiveness and skin damage.
HN recommends it as a cool, eye-opening look at the hidden ultraviolet world, especially in sunscreen and vitamin D threads.
3 comments from Hacker News
Mildly amusing related aside from this. Because of this, glass is completely opaque in the UV spectrum. Looking at the world in UV [1] is quite interesting! Such a reminder that how and what we experience of the world is so largely a product of our physiological composition. What is perfectly transparent to us would be a great hiding place from the perspective of something that only saw in UV. [1] - this video
You need fancy lenses to do UV photography. From wikipedia: "For UV photography it is necessary to use specially developed lenses having elements made from fused quartz or quartz and fluorite." Veritasium has a video using a special UV setup, it's pretty cool - this video
I'm in my mid/late 50s, and had grandparents from Ireland, that is, I'm light skinned. As a kid my brothers and I would compete who could peel off the longest continuous strip of skin a day or two after going to the beach. Anyway, the skin on my exposed arms looks like "old man" skin -- lots of blotches, and more importantly not elastic. However, the skin that lives under my short sleeves is not only unblemished, it is as elastic as when I was a teenager. In short: yes, it will help against cosmetic damage as well as skin cancer. Bonus: the youtube channel veritasium did a video a few years ago where they use a UV filter on a camera to show (a) the effectiveness of sunscreen and (b) the damage which is visible in the UV years before it shows up in visible light. this video