Short Stuff: Mood Rings

Mood Rings were all the rage in the 1970s. Then they went away, and fast. What's your color today?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
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

(00:33):
mood rings.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Chuck, I did not. I believe my sister did though.

Speaker 1 (00:47):
Sure of course your older sister, right.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
Yeah, six years older. So that was right in the wheelhouse.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
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

(01:13):
fast as it came along.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Key parties, cocaine, all that stuff went away.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
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

(01:43):
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

(02:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
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

(02:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
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

(03:28):
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

(03:49):
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.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Yeah, there was one guy who has a patent, Chinese
inventor who patented it in nineteen ninety seven.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
I love that.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
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?

Speaker 2 (04:25):
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

(04:45):
parachute pants.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
That would be lucrative.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I bought that in the nineties and everyone's like, what
are you doing?

Speaker 1 (04:52):
Man? Did you ever have parachute pants in the nineties.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
For him too, factory rejects.

Speaker 2 (05:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
I don't even know what that is.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Oh no, let's go to break. You should have say Gucci. Alright,
let's go to break, all right, Charles, I know what

(06:12):
Gucci is.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, I should have said Gucci.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
Or Polo.

Speaker 1 (06:18):
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

(06:39):
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.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
I have the same answer kind of kind.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Of Yeah, they're definitely not They're definitely not bs or bunk.

Speaker 1 (07:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
I wonder if what's it called when you can like
predator heat sensing.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Thermal imaging.

Speaker 2 (08:10):
Yeah, has that got anything to do with it?

Speaker 1 (08:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
I mean, well, liquid crystal displays. I geah, LCDs, Yeah,
I guess so LCD sound System, Sure.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
They use thermotropic liquid crystals.

Speaker 2 (08:27):
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

(08:52):
then is when they're twisting around, they are affecting the
light spectrum. And that is why it is literally color.

Speaker 1 (09:00):
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,

(09:23):
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

(09:43):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
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

(10:18):
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

(10:38):
anxious to just really feeling super stressed.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
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,

(11:03):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
I think that's great and another.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
For a teenager in the seventies to buy it exactly.

Speaker 1 (11:29):
Chuck delivered as verdict on mood rings, which means short
stuff is out.

Speaker 2 (11:36):
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