Easy Glowing Flowers Experiment

Materials you’ll need

• White flowers

• Clear cup/vase

• Highlighters

• Water

• Scissors

• Black light/UV light (can be found at Target, Amazon, or Walmart)

Step-by-step tutorial

Step 1: Before you start, test your highlighters and see which glows best under the black fluorescent light. We found that yellow worked best!

Step 2: Fill a clear cup or vase halfway with water.

Step 3: Pull the tip out of the highlighter. If it’s stuck, you can use pliers or cut open the highlighter with a box cutter to remove the inner fibers.

Step 4: Place the tip or inner fibers from the highlighter in the water.

Step 5: Take your white flowers and cut the end of the stems at an angle.

Step 6: Place the flowers into the vessel with the water. Let sit for 1-2 days.

Step 7: Shine the black fluorescent light on the petals to see them glow!

Grownup guide

This project uses a "black light" to make a flower glow. Black fluorescent lights look a little bit purple, but it's the light that you can't see that's really interesting. Black lights produce ultraviolet (UV) light. Our eyes can't perceive UV light, but our skin can feel it; UV light is why we get sunburns. Some substances, like the ink in many highlighter pens, will glow under a UV light. For that to happen, the fluorescent ink absorbs the energy in the UV light and then emits it as visible light. Groovy!