Budget Blacklight Special Effects With A Highlighter

As part of my research on making things look glowingly magical in an upcoming music video I’m being asked to direct, I was told that highlighters have the hidden ability to glow in the dark when graced with the presence of a blacklight
. Curious to test things out (and also happening to have a blacklight
hidden in one of my closets) I invited Alliebee Henna to come over and doodle all over my body with a highlighter and see what we could create.

This pattern took a surprisingly long 4 hours to create (with a couple fails in between) and a total of 3 highlighter. A small note: highighters are extremely hard to erase from skin! We tried rubbing with a loofah, soap and even some alcohol and couldn’t…for the life of us couldn’t erase it completely! To the visible eye, it’s not so bad… but in the blacklight, the wipes show. Thankfully, Alliebee was able to do a remarkable job on me despite my continuous fidgeting! We even attempted to dilute highlighter in water to put in my hair but that unfortunately really didn’t produce as much light as we were hoping for so a wig became plan B.

These shots were taken at ISO 1600, f2.8 and 1/60th of a second so if you do attempt this on your own, be sure to try and bring the light as close as possible because these things don’t put out very much light!

Hopefully this inspires you guys to try things out on you

PS. Do not open highlighter with knife. It can be dangerous