Mood Rings - What color are you feeling?
Mood rings (copyright protected) were one of the fun and popular fads in the 1970’s although from time to time, they seem to resurface and become popular again. I’ll be the first to admit that I was the proud owner of mood rings in the late 1980’s. The idea behind mood rings is very simple. You wear it on your finger and wait for it to change to a specific color. Whatever color it changes to is reflective of the state of your current emotions. Typically, the stone in the ring should be a dark blue if you are happy and it turns black if you are anxious or stressed about something. Although nothing has been scientifically proven that this is actually true, they are very good indicators of your body and its involuntary physical reactions to what kind of emotional state you are left in.
The stone in mood rings is either a hollow glass shell filled with thermotropic liquid crystals or a clear glass stone which sits upon a thin sheet of liquid crystals. The molecules in these liquid crystals are very sensitive. They change according to temperature and change position or twist. This molecular change in their structure affects the wavelengths of light that are reflected by the liquid crystals which results in a change in the color of the stones in mood rings. When the temperature gets higher, the liquid crystal molecules twist slightly in one direction. The twist causes the liquid crystal substance to absorb more of the green and red portions of the light that’s visible and it eventually reflects blue. This is what causes mood rings to turn dark blue. When the temperature goes down, the molecules twist in the other direction and reflect another portion of the end of the spectrum.
Typically, the following colors on this page are what are normally reflected in mood rings and these are the moods that they represent:
Dark blue: happy, loving or passionate
Blue: relaxed or calm
Blue-green: Semi-relaxed
Green: normal
Amber: somewhat nervous or anxious
Gray: very nervous or anxious or uneasy
Black: stressed and tense
If you think about these moods that are represented in mood rings and the colors, you’ll notice a correlation between your body’s surface temp and the color of the liquid crystal. When you are feeling loving at home, your skin is typically flushed. This is because the capillaries are moving closer to the surface of your skin and are releasing heat. When you are nervous or stressed, your skin might get clammy. This is because the capillaries are trying to search to move deeper into your skin which is causing your surface temp to drop.