Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Mood Rings

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Mood Rings were all the rage in the 1970s. Then they went away, and fast. What's your color today?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff, Josh and Chuck here, Jerry's there too, Dave's here, kinda, and this is short stuff. 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 HowStuffWorks.com and the Chicago Tribune and one of our old favorites, Atlas Obscura. A-O. Let's talk mood rings.

Yeah, so if you were alive in the mid-70s 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. You're 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 1975, there's a couple of theories of who came up with it, as we'll see, but within a few months, 40 million mood rings sold, and then just like everything else that was a fad in the 70s, 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 1975, Maris, Ambatts, and Josh Reynolds as the inventors, Reynolds, as the story goes at least, was a Wall Street worker and was very stressed out with that high-stress job, said, I'm going to drop out, I'm going to 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. And he said, I got a ring that actually produces mood feedback. So the idea is that 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 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 purposely relax your muscles, like your neck muscles. You can try breathing exercises that slow your heart rate a little bit, and that's the point of it. It's to be aware of your emotions. Go to a tea party. 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 down at and be like, oh, that's my mood, I'm actually anxious, so I need to do some yoga. Yeah. Exactly. Which is pretty smart. Yeah, so that's one... No, let's go ahead and talk about the next guy before we take

our break. The other story, which doesn't have a whole lot around it, like on the internet, almost everyone points to Josh Reynolds and Mary Sam Bats. But Marvin Wernick was a jeweler, and some people say he invented the mood ring kind of the same year basically, 1975, because he saw a doctor put thermotropic tape to the forehead of a child to measure their temperature and thought, hey, that's a great idea if we could just measure our body temperature and sort of see it 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, a Chinese inventor who patented it in 1997. I love that. But even still, by the time... I mean, just by the time Josh Reynolds tried it, it was

over, 1997. It's like, why would you even waste your money on that? Well, I think that's not too dumb though, like it could come back in a new and different way. Okay. All right. And then this dude holds the patent. Not a bad idea.

Okay. Fine. Especially, oh, I could see doing that because the 70s were in again in the 90s, so. Yeah. So we could retrend. Heads off, unnamed Chinese inventor. Like I own the patent to parachute pants. That would be lucrative.

I bought that in the 90s, and everyone was like, what are you doing? Man, did you ever have parachute pants in the 90s? No, I was... We didn't have a lot of money to buy the fashionable stuff, and that was never in the... I never can remember the name, but whatever the thing is, where your shoelaces have won too many eyes or your zippers backwards or whatever, like factory seconds, but there's another name for them too. Factory rejects? I don't know.

But anyway, that's where I was shopping. Ain't 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 were something else. Of course you were rich. These were not really nice high... They weren't like Hermes parachute pants or anything like that.

I don't even know what that is. Hermes is a very high-end luxury brand. Okay. I don't think they ever made parachute pants, and now that joke sucks because I had to explain the whole thing. Oh no. Let's go to break. You should have said Gucci.

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. How about that?

La cost? We're talking mood rings after all. Not just mood rings. They came out with mood pendants, mood chokers, mood bracelets, anything to show you what your mood was. If you start diving into mood rings or what later became called mood jewelry, bio mood jewelry or truth jewelry, there's an actual 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. And before we get to that, the question is, do mood rings work? And the answer, Chuck's answer after reading a lot about this is kind of. I have the same answer. Kind of?

Yeah. 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 it was 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 arcane. I wonder if, what's it called when you can like a predator heat sensing. Thermal imaging?

Yeah. Is 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 it's all. Liquid crystal displays. I guess.

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 changing 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. 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 they cobbled together like a bunch of different things that are real and put them together in something that is 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 we can go through the colors here. 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 and slash relaxed. And 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, maybe a little romantic or super happy. And then it goes down the scale from amber to gray to black, from nervous or anxious,

to very nervous or anxious, to just really feeling super stressed. And so again, it kind of makes some sense when you are feeling passionate, you're probably a little bit flushed, 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 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 for a teenager in the 70s to buy it. Exactly.

Chuck delivered his verdict on mood rings, which means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts on My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.