Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Josh and Chuck here, Jerry's there too, Dave's here kind of and this is short stuck.
This I think is sort of why we started short Stuff. This is the perfect little bite size topic and this one. The articles that I used to cobble this together were from houstuffworks dot com and the Chicago Tribune and one of our old favorites Atlas Obscura. Hey, oh, let's talk mood rings.
Yeah, so if you were alive in the mid seventies and probably over the age of eight, there's a good chance that you had a mood ring.
Chuck, I did not. I believe my sister did though.
Sure of course your older sister, right.
Yeah, six years older. So that was right in the wheelhouse.
Yeah, And they just kind of came out of nowhere in nineteen seventy five. There's a couple of theories of who came up with it. As we'll see in a few months, forty million mood rings sold. And then, just like everything else that was a fad in the seventies, pet rocks, well, pet rocks, it was just gone as fast as it came along.
Key parties, cocaine, all that stuff went away.
Sure.
Yeah, it's amazing how fast and how lucrative this flash in the pan was invented. And there's a couple of stories here about who introduced this thing. Most people point to in nineteen seventy five Maris Ambats and Josh Reynolds as the inventor's. Reynolds, as the story goes, at least was a Wall street worker and was very stressed out with that high stressed job. Said I'm going to I'm going to drop out. I'm gonna start getting into biofeedback.
I'm going to open a meditation center. It's called the q Tran Ltd or q Tran Limited. I guess, sure, And he said, I got a ring that actually produces mood feedback. So the idea is that you can you can see how you're doing literally by looking at the ring on your finger, and then know where you are if you're anxious, if you're upset, if you're chilled out, and what you need to do, like you might need to meditate or come and pay me money to come to my center.
Sure, And there's actually like legitimacy to that with biofeedback in particular, where if you can recognize what emotional state you're in, you can actually take steps to get out of it. If it's a negative emotional state, you can sure purposely relax your muscles, like your neck muscles. You can try breathing exercises that slow your heart rate a little bit, like it's And that's the point of it. It's to be aware of your emotions. And so exactly, and what he was coming up or you could do
some cocaine. Sure, what he was coming up with was this ring that you could just look to and be like, oh, that's my mood. I need to like, I'm actually anxious, so I need to do.
Some yoga, yeah exactly, which is pretty smart. Yeah, so that's one. Maybe we should. Now let's go ahead and talk about the next guy. Okay, before we take our break. The other story, which doesn't have a whole lot around it.
Like on the internet, almost everyone points at Josh Reynolds and Maris Ambats, But Marvin Wernick was a jeweler, and some people say he invented the mood ring kind of the same year, basically nineteen seventy five, because he saw a doctor put a thermotropic tape to the forehead of a child to measure their temperature, and thought, hey, you know, that's a great idea. If we could just measure our body temperature and sort of see it, you know, beyond
like a readout but see a color. I could market that. And he didn't get a patent. And I don't think we said earlier Josh Reynolds didn't get a patent. It takes a while to do that. And like we said, this thing was a really quick flash in the pan. And so by the time any of these guys tried to get a patent, it was kind of over.
Yeah, there was one guy who has a patent, Chinese inventor who patented it in nineteen ninety seven.
I love that.
But even still, like by the time that I mean just by the time Josh Reynolds tried it, it was over nineteen ninety seven. It's like, why would you even waste your money on that?
But well, I think that's not too dumb though, Like it could come back in a do in different way, okay, and then this dude holds the patent. Not a bad idea, okay, fine, especially, oh, I could see doing that because the seventies were in again in the nineties. Yes, some you can retrend hats off unnamed Chinese inventor, like I am the patent to parachute pants.
That would be lucrative.
I bought that in the nineties and everyone's like, what are you doing?
Man? Did you ever have parachute pants in the nineties.
No, I was, you know, we didn't have a lot of money to buy like the bachetable stuff, and that was never in the the uh. I never can remember the name. But whatever the thing is where your shoelaces have one too many eyes, or your zippers backwards or whatever. Oh the like factory seconds. But there's another name.
For him too, factory rejects.
I don't know. But anyway, that's where I was shopping, right, and the parachute pants never came through there. I probably would have gotten them had I had the opportunity.
Well, I had some and they sure something else you were rich. They were not like, these were not really nice high They weren't like Arimez parachute pants or anything like that.
I don't even know what that is.
Ames is a very high end luxury brand, okay, and I don't think they ever made parachute pants. And now that a joke sucks because I had to explain the whole thing.
Oh no, let's go to break. You should have say Gucci. Alright, let's go to break, all right, Charles, I know what Gucci is.
Yeah, I should have said Gucci.
Or Polo.
Okay, that joke is in the rear view about cost. So we're talking mood rings, after all, and not just mood rings. They came out with like mood pendants, mood chokers, mood bracelets, anything to show you what your mood was. And if you kind of start diving into mood rings or what later became called like mood jewelry biomod biomood jewelry or truth jewelry, there's an actual like function of those rings. It's not a stone. It's not magic or
anything like that. Well, it's magic if you find science magical. But there's a pretty easy explanation for it.
Yeah. Like, and before we get to that, like the question is do mood rings work? And the answer my Chuck's answer after reading a lot about this is kind of.
I have the same answer kind of kind.
Of Yeah, they're definitely not They're definitely not bs or bunk.
No. But at the same time, I think a lot of people who think that they're real think that it's actually sensing your emotion. It's not. It's just sensing minute changes in temperature on your skin.
That's right. So how these work is is it's got a sometimes a little hollow glass container mounted in a ring. Sometimes it was like a clear glass stone on a little thin sheet of these liquid crystals. And inside the clear glass container were these thermotropic liquid crystals.
Yes, which I looked up and I cannot make heads or tails of what they're used for specifically or it's everything about it is like all nothing but science direct, and it's all our cane.
I wonder if what's it called when you can like predator heat sensing.
Thermal imaging.
Yeah, has that got anything to do with it?
I don't know. I don't think so. I saw that it's used in displays, but I didn't see how or what kind of displays.
I mean, well, liquid crystal displays. I geah, LCDs, Yeah, I guess so LCD sound System, Sure.
They use thermotropic liquid crystals.
Sure, but at any rate, as my friend Josh would say, the upshot is these liquid crystal molecules are just super sensitive, and they are very sensitive to temperature in particular, and when temperature is affecting these crystals, they will twist around, they'll move positions depending on that temperature. And what happens then is when they're twisting around, they are affecting the light spectrum. And that is why it is literally color.
Yeah, Like they twist one way, they reflect blue, so the thing looks blue. They twist another way because of a change in temperature, they reflect black or green or something like that. I think amber is another one. And so the reason that this isn't actually bunk is because
your skin does undergo minute temperature changes when your mood changes. Yeah, And what they did was they basically calibrated the temperature of an emotion, your skin temperature when you're experiencing some emotion or a kind of neutral emotion, and figured out what color that creates in the thermotropic liquid crystals. And then they basically said, well, if your mood ring is
this color, you're probably experiencing this emotion. So it's they cobbled together like a bunch of different things that are real and put them together in something that it's kind of real.
That's right. I think it's kind of cool that they came up with an average on the color scale, which is green, based on your average body temperature. So that makes sense. And then you know, we can go through the colors here. Sure, green is normal. Like I said, if you go up on the scale you go to the bluish green, that means you're kind of relaxed. If you are blue, you are calm slash relaxed. And then if you're dark blue, if it really goes blue, that
means you're feeling like really good. You're like maybe passionate about something a little romantic or super happy. And then it goes down the scale from amber to gray to black, from you know, nervous or anxious to very nervous or anxious to just really feeling super stressed.
Right, and so again it kind of makes some sense. When you are feeling passionate, you're probably a little bit flushed, sure, and so your skin temperature is going to increase. When you're anxious, you actually start to feel a little bit cold, and your skin temperature decreases. I'm not sure if it's calibrated so accurately that you could divide it like that, but right, sure, it's possible. It's not like completely out
of the realm of possibility. The point is it doesn't matter anymore because mood rings aren't really around.
That's right, and there are a lot of other things that go into your emotional state beyond the temperature of your skin. So that's why I firmly land on it kind of works.
I think that's great and another.
For a teenager in the seventies to buy it exactly.
Chuck delivered as verdict on mood rings, which means short stuff is out.
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