Gravity defying lip gloss explained

do that what is it doing I what is this this video is sponsored by blinka ste might have seen these viral videos that show lipgloss behaving in a strange way they first appeared on tick tock which is a clock app I think and I wanted to see if I could reproduce the effect and explain why it happens I think I've achieved both so to start with I bought a whole load of lipgloss to begin with I just try to copy the behavior that I saw in the videos which seems to be you know pull it out quickly there and what that does is leave a little sort of Tralee bit coming out and then you sort of you turn it upside down and that Tralee bit grows and grows and grows and it flies off some people were judging it a bit first I just couldn't get it to work and that makes sense really because if it was that easy to reproduce we'd all know about it and it wouldn't be a surprise there must be other conditions that you need to meet so this is when I start to hypothesize about the cause so my feeling is that it's static electricity so you know if you put your hands on a Van de Graaff generator your hair stands on end that's because like charges repel so when you put your hands on Van de Graaff generator the its pumping charge into your body or onto your body and onto the surface of your hair because like charges repel your hairs are repelling each other and in doing so they stand up on end to get us far away from each other as they can and a similar thing is happening probably in my opinion with the lip gloss so you have that small strand of lip gloss it's negatively charged so it's trying to get away from itself is trying to get away from the rest of the wand it elongates it stretches and eventually a bit of it flies off but why would the lip gloss be statically charged in the first place my theory is that the people holding the lip gloss are statically charged and they're passing some of that static charge onto the lipgloss even probably experienced being statically charged like if you touch a metal door handle and you get an electric shock that's because prior to touching the door handle you were statically charged probably because you were shuffling around on a carpet and in doing so you were kind of scraping electrons off the carpet and storing them on your body and it was anyone you touched a conductor like a metal door handle that it was conducted away and you felt it as a shock except that I tried this I've been shuffling around on a carpet for hours and I couldn't get the effect to appear my wife suggested that maybe it's to do with bringing the lipgloss into contact with your skin specifically your lips that didn't work either so I had to bring out the big guns I'm on my way to the Royal Institution the spiritual home of science outreach in the UK imagine over 100 years ago Michael Faraday wowing the general public with his experiments I know a great science outreach person called Fran Scott who keeps her Van de Graaff generator there and the word on the slack group is that her Van de Graaff generator is better than anyone elses so in my hand I'm gonna charge myself up I'm standing on this foam block to separate myself from the ground I hate static shocked by the way so this is deep you imprison explain for me quite close to a radiator there which making make me nervous as well it makes the noises in the air and it's like I can feel it on my head I hate it it's so grim I feel I feel really charged up but not in a good way not in a metaphorical way right that is a no so I've cut that handle off this one because there's a there's a sort of a hole in the top of the Van de Graaff generator and I should put to fit this in and see if we can do it directly you know that's not bad I feel like we're starting to validate my hypothesis that it's an electrostatic phenomenon and it is phenomenon by the way not phenomena I've got that wrong in my previous video and some people let me know thanks pedants you're doing important work right being sarcastic is important pedants are important you don't have to like them but they're important the people in the original video probably didn't have access to a Van de Graaff generator so this is something else we need to fill in that part of the story and also the little strands that I was getting were quite thin and pathetic compared to the viral video so I wanted to see if I can improve on that and I remembered I already have a handheld battery powered Van de Graaff generator it's called a fun fly stick and you use it to levitate tinsel you press this button here and you touch the tinsel on the cardboard tube and the coverage of transfers charge the tinsel they all repel each other in it and it floats around great I tried just kind of pressing the button and rubbing the lipgloss applicator wand on the cardboard tube that didn't work either and then I had the idea look if you take it apart you can see there's the electrode so maybe if I use crocodile clips to transfer that electrode so that it's directly on top of the end of the applicator wand look at that so look if you've got a little bit of lip gloss that's already sticking out slightly past because of the way you drew it from the container then it turns out charge will actually preferentially gather around that sticky out bit that's because you get more charge density around curved surfaces than around flat surfaces that's for complicated reasons that I don't go into in this video but what it means is you end up with a sort of positive feedback loop because you've got more charge on this like you sticky out bit that slightly sticky a bit is trying to get away from itself and so it starts to stretch and as it stretches it becomes even more tightly curved and so you get even more charge density and it stretches even more until eventually bits of it stop flying off so what does it happen with lip gloss and not eyeliner or other products well lip gloss is made of oils and waxes and they're insulators and if you want static charge to gather on a surface then the surface needs to be an insulator if it was a conductor then it would conduct the charge away so in terms of like the ingredients of lip gloss it makes sense that that would be the place that you see the phenomenon but so far I haven't been able to reproduce the effects organically let's say just by using it and moving around my feeling is still that the people holding the lip gloss are statically charged themselves it didn't work for me perhaps because it takes time for the static charge on the person to propagate into the applicator wand of the lipgloss or maybe it needs to be warmer for it to work under those circumstances to make it less viscous so maybe I needed to hold on to it for longer having my pocket for longer I might keep experimenting but at this point I'm pretty satisfied that it's an electrostatic phenomenon and I'm really happy with the fridge they got on my macro lens I don't get much time for reading these days that the time I do get is really precious I get a little bit at the end of the day and I worry about what am I gonna commit that precious time to I know it's been ages try to figure out what to read in the end I just give up a lot of the time and I just scroll through read it until it's time to go to sleep and I want to tell you how the sponsor of this video is helping me with that so it's blink astray cos does this remarkable thing they take the key insights from nonfiction titles and condense it down to a 15 minute read it's also audio narrated so you can listen to it as well that works in two ways for me for certain titles the 15 minutes is all I want I just want those key insights and that's it and it's an amazing way to get those four other titles like sapiens for example this book here I was thinking about reading that for a long time but worrying about you know should I commit my precious reading time to this is title well I read the 15 minute summary on pinkest and then I was like yeah I'm gonna read the whole thing this is awesome so those are the two ways that I use it because they're sponsoring this video the first 100 people to go to blink is calm for - Steve mold the link is also in the description there they'll get seven days completely for it free full access no strings attached you can cancel anytime you like and if you do decide to carry on then you get 25% off using that link so i would recommend sapiens even the 15-minute version it's like a great summary of the history of humans and Thinking Fast and Slow a really interesting look from an economists point of view about how we make decisions really interesting so yeah check it out today I hope you enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to hit subscribe and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Steve Mould

Views: 1,150,667

Rating: 4.9464121 out of 5

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Id: _4VgQo-bAnY

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020