Let It Glow

If you’ve followed Super7 for any amount of time you know that we LOVE, LOVE, LOVE glow-in-the-dark stuff: Glow toys! Glow apparel designs! Glow packaging! Let it glow, let it glow, let it glow! There’s something magical and fun about something that can be visible in the light AND the dark! But how does glow-in-the-dark magic happen? We will try to explain this scientific process in a way that won’t put you to sleep. So, turn off the lights and let’s GLOW!

Action figures begin life as a pile of plastic resin pellets. These resin pellets are melted and injected into molds to form the individual parts that are assembled into the action figures that journey to your display shelf or desk. For glow figures something additional is added to this special toy sauce.

Behold! The wonder of modern toy making science: glow powder! If this was a science class it would be explained like this:

YAWN! That’s pretty boring! THIS is what glow powder looks like in real life at the Super7 toy factory:

Now here is a pre-production part from a glow-in-the-dark figure during the molding process at the Super7 factory. It’s being compared to the color chip for the specific shade of glow we requested to verify that it’s correct and up to our final production standards.

How does glow work? Well, if this was a science class it would be explained like this:

Dang, that’s NOT very exciting... While it may seem like something created in a mad scientist’s laboratory, the reality is that glow-in-the-dark is a fairly straightforward process. Photoluminescent materials contain phosphors, which get charged up by visible or UV light, meaning they store energy from photons, and release it as visible light when a light source is removed. Neat, right?! When the lights go out, it looks rad, just like this:

BOOM! Glow-in-the-dark glory! How fun is THAT!?

Super7 also likes to have fun with glow-in-the-dark inks in our packaging to further enchance the glowtastic fun of some of our releases. Here are some examples of cool glow packaging we've made: