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Color plays a significant role in communicating food quality. Consumers can easily identify an underbaked or overbaked cookie by its abnormal color and texture, knowing these elements will impact its taste. On the other hand, individuals will associate a perfectly caramelized cookie with a high-quality product that likely tastes great. 

How a cookie looks directly impacts consumer buying habits. You can use a color spectrophotometer to measure the color of your cookie samples to ensure they project a consistent and desirable appearance.

Challenges of Measuring Cookie Color

While measuring cookie color is vital for producing a high-quality product, this process can pose several challenges to manufacturers:

• Irregular texture: Cookies have many inconsistent characteristics that make color analysis more difficult, such as their varying shapes, sizes, and highly textured surfaces. To the naked eye, it's nearly impossible to make an accurate color determination.
• Time commitment: Large-scale cookie manufacturers must analyze thousands of cookies each year. Measuring the color of cookie samples one at a time can be extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive.
• Equipment wear and tear: Normal wear and tear can impact your color measurement device's performance, leading to inaccurate measurements. 

Color correcting makeup gives users a natural, fresh-face looked, a welcome change from the heavy contouring that has dominated cosmetics trends for years. Image Source: Pexels user Valeria Boltneva

For the past several years, contouring has been all the rage in cosmetics. By carefully applying shadows and highlights in the forms of creams and powders, you’re able to bring out your best features and reduce the visual impact of those you’d rather minimize. But as with all trends, the contouring craze may be coming to an end.

Tired of the heavy cosmetics and time-consuming application process, consumers are increasingly craving a more natural look and turning to color correcting makeup to even out the complexion for a beautiful, fresh-faced appearance. “I love that this is becoming a new trend, because it allows everyone to think more like an artist and wear less full-coverage makeup,” says Darais, a makeup artist for Lancôme. “In spring, especially, we want a fresh approach to our skin.”1

Color correcting makeup works by using the basic concepts of color theory to diminish flaws and create a balanced skin tone. Green corrects for redness, peachy tones hide dark undereye circles, and purple and blue shades combats sallow, yellow skin. The key is to not overdo it; according to Dell Ashley, director of makeup artistry at Yves Stain Laurent, consumers should be sure to use a light touch. “This technique is used to neutralize the skin and should be undetectable when you are finished.”2

Truly getting the best results from color correcting makeup, however, isn’t just a matter of application, it’s about selecting the best products. For cosmetics companies, that means precisely formulating color correcting products to create a seamless blend between the applied color and the skin tone being corrected. If the color isn’t exactly right, it’s easy for consumers to end up looking more like a modern painting than someone with a flawless complexion. Spectrophotometric color measurement gives cosmetics companies the ability to monitor color throughout development and manufacturing to ensure that color correcting products give users the beautiful, natural results they are looking for.

Spectrophotometers allow cosmetics companies to gain deep insight into the color of their products, facilitating both formulation and manufacturing. Image Source: Unsplash user Manu Camargo

Photodegradation caused by UV and visible light exposure can cause drastic color changes in natural wood. Image Source: Unsplash user Zbysiu Rodak

The sun’s color shifting effects on wood are obvious to anyone who has seen the stark white limbs of driftwood on a beach or the silvery gray of a weathered barn. Or, more frustratingly, anyone who’s moved a piece of furniture only to discover that the hardwood flooring underneath is a distinctly different color than the rest of the room. These color changes are the product of a series of photochemical reactions on the surface of the wood primarily resulting from ultraviolet radiation, or UV light, with visible light also contributing to the shift in coloration.

Not only do these color shifts often disrupt a pleasing aesthetic appearance of wood products, they also indicate degradation of the wood itself, compromising durability and structural integrity. UV-resistant clear coating can prevent both undesirable aesthetic and material changes, but formulating these products requires exacting color measurement to optimize efficacy.

The Need for Transparent UV-Resistant Clear Coating Systems

To protect wood products from color change resulting from light exposure, commercial producers and hobbyists alike use a range of UV-resistant finishing products that shield the vulnerable wooden surface from the photodamage of both natural and artificial light sources. Today, these products primarily take the form of pigmented stains in which the pigment itself offers varying levels of UV protection. However, pigmented products inherently alter the color of the wood and clear coat alternatives have not historically been formulated to offer comparable UV protection, much to the frustration of woodworkers who wish to maintain a natural appearance by using transparent finishes. As noted in Paint & Coatings Industry magazine:

Transparent systems that allow the natural features of wood – including color, grain and texture – to remain visible are attracting interest and demand for them has been increasing. However, the long-term instability of such transparent systems in outdoor applications has so far seriously hindered them from becoming more widespread. The main reason for this instability is the UV light transparency of the topcoats and the extreme sensitivity of certain wood components, particularly lignin, to UV light degradation.1

According to Mark Knaebe, a chemist at Forest Products Laboratory, most UV-resistant clear coatings currently act more like a sunscreen than a long-lasting solution for photodegradation. “The organic molecules can only handle so many photons before they fall apart.”2 Sometimes, UV protection can last as little as a few months, resulting in not only rapid color change, but mechanical degradation of the wood, compromising both appearance and function.

Clear coatings allow the natural beauty and character of the wood to shine through, but poor UV protection leaves it vulnerable to yellowing and darkening over time. Image Source: Unsplash user Erol Ahmed

Monitoring chromium in leather and leather tanning wastewater is essential for preserving environmental and human health. Image Source: Pexels user Jay Mantri

The manufacture of everyday objects and materials relies on a variety of substances whose use may have serious health consequences if not properly contained. In the leather tanning industry, chromium is one of the primary elements that must be accounted for in order to preserve environmental and public health. Currently, 90% of global leather manufacturing relies on chrome-tanning owing to its stabilizing properties, allowing leather to resist microbial degradation as well as temperature variation, sweat exposure, and other environmental stressors.

However, only 20% of the material can be converted into leather while 25% becomes waste, primarily introduced into wastewater. Left untreated, this wastewater can cause significant damage to human health and the environment. As such monitoring chromium is necessary to ensure the safety of both the leather itself and leather tanning effluent to protect people, ecosystems, water supply, and agricultural land from unsafe levels of chromium exposure while also meeting local regulations.1

Unfortunately, traditional methods of chromium determination, such as graphic furnace atomic absorption spectrometry and flame atomic absorption spectrometry are time-consuming and destructive, requiring extensive sample preparation. In order to develop a more rapid, reliable, and user-friendly chromium determination method, researchers are turning to UV-Vis spectrophotometry.

Chromium-containing wastewater can wreak havoc on agricultural lands and introduce the toxic material into the food supply. Image Source: Pexels user McDobbie Hu

Recycled paint is the cornerstone of paint product stewardship programs that aim to protect environmental and public health by diverting leftover paints from landfills, incinerators, and wastewater. Image Source: Flickr user United Soybean Board

There are certain truisms when it comes to home renovation: buy 10% more flooring than you need. Measure twice, cut once. And, in my case, buy double the amount of paint you end up using. Unfortunately, I am not alone in my overzealous paint buying; according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “10% of paint purchased in the United States each year—about 65-69 million gallons—is discarded.”1

Without proper disposal, these paints typically end up poured down the drain, incinerated, or embedded in landfills, where they can pose serious environmental and health risks due to the inclusion of toxic pigments, additives, and VOCs. Paints not disposed of in the correct manner can be responsible for up to 32% of natural emissions to wastewater and a single gallon has the potential to pollute up to 250,000 gallons of water.2

To address this issue, governments and paint suppliers are increasingly turning to a product stewardship approach in which “all participants involved in the life cycle of a product take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the production, use, and end-of life management of the product.”3 Since the passing of the first paint stewardship law in Oregon in 2009, several other states have followed suit, and the United States is increasingly joining countries around the world who have established their own stewardship programs to protect environmental and human health. At the heart of these programs is recycled paint.

Paint recycling protects fragile ecosystems from the damage caused by toxic wastewater. Image Source: Pexels user Eutah Mizushima

Consumers are increasingly looking to incorporate green products into their daily lives, but many find the performance of eco-friendly laundry detergents lacking. Image Source: Flickr user Bruce Guenter

Over the past decade, popular awareness about the environmental impact of everyday consumer products has exploded. While eco-friendly products were once a niche market reserved for those with a passion for environmental protection, today it has become increasingly common for a routine shopping trip to take the environment into account and eco-friendly options are now the default choice for even mainstream consumers. In response to growing demand, green laundry detergent manufacturers such as Ecover, Seventh Generation, Simple Green, and Method have emerged to compete with traditional players and are capturing a healthy portion of the marketshare. This push towards eco-friendly alternatives to traditional products has been so strong that detergent giant Procter & Gamble recently committed to eliminating phosphates from all of its laundry detergents globally within two years.1

However, phosphates aren’t the only ingredient that eco-conscious consumers are seeking to avoid. In fact, the list of objectionable ingredients is lengthy and includes many of the very things that make traditional laundry detergents both effective and appealing, such as optical brighteners, sodium lauryl sulfate, chlorine, ammonia, and petroleum solvents. Unfortunately, taking these components out of laundry detergents often compromises performance and consumers looking to incorporate eco-friendly products in their everyday routines are left unsatisfied with the results. According to Consumer Reports, “Green detergents may lack the enzymes and other chemicals that give many standard detergents their stain-fighting oomph.”2 For many consumers, this means having to choose between clean laundry and environmental ethics; as one review of green laundry detergent performance noted,  “If you can look past the stain-fighting abilities of this one, it does have an impressive list of eco-claims.”3

The questionable performance of eco-friendly detergents as a group could threaten the economic viability of some brands. In order to bolster appeal and commercial success, it is critical that manufacturers of green laundry detergents carefully evaluate the performance of their products to ensure that they have the cleaning power necessary to satisfy consumers. Spectrophotometric instrumentation offers the best way to obtain objective, reliable performance data and analyze the efficacy of detergents.

Green laundry detergent should be formulated to help fabrics maintain their color and effectively remove staining. Image Source: Unsplash user Kelly Sikkema

Despite the emergence of digital technologies, printed media still plays a vital role and gives us opportunities for visual communication unmatched by digital alternatives. Image Source: Unsplash user Annie Spratt

In an age of digital media, it can sometimes be easy to forget the simple pleasure of sitting down with a magazine, book, catalog, or newspaper. There is something special about having an object in your hands, feeling the paper, and seeing images exactly the way they were meant to be viewed. After all, paper and ink ensure that every viewer sees the same photographs and illustrations without the slight color variations inherent to screens, making them irreplaceable when image quality is a top priority. Whether it’s giving customers an exact representation of a product color, creating an artist catalog, or showcasing the carefully chosen colors of a designer’s latest collection, there is nothing quite like printed media.

Of course, the quality of printed media depends on the quality of the ingredients, particularly ink. As The Stothard Group says, “The very simple reality of producing ink is that the customer is buying color.”1 Those colors must be both accurate and consistent, allowing for print media customers to create exact reproductions of photographs and illustrations again and again throughout the run of a particular product as well as in potential future reprints. While it is easy to recognize the importance of ink color quality when producing media such as artist catalogs or coffee table books, even mass-produced, everyday items like magazines depend on color consistency for marketability.

[Magazines] are normally going to be laid out next to each other on shelving in a shop. If the ink is even a slightly different color, whether a different hue or too light or two dark, it will be instantly noticeable and reduces the perceived quality of the product being sold. If the colors dull from magazine to magazine, they will not be as vibrant on the shelves and therefore not as appealing to a customer.

Indeed, despite the move toward digital media, printers are “under more pressure to produce highly accurate color” than ever before.2 “Commercially acceptable color has been redefined over the last decade,” says Steve Miller, color systems technology manager for Kohl and Madden, the commercial inks division of Sun Chemical. “Printers are being pushed hard by brand owners to match colors precisely. This has given rise to the use of spectrophotometers and color-matching software, which provide tighter tolerance on measurements.”

Spectrophotometric measurement of ink color ensures accurate, consistent printing that enhances the quality and appeal of printed media. Image Source: Pexels user Noe Araujo