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Robotics

LED Eyeshadow, The Latest In The World Of Battery-Operated Fashion

Peter Murray
May 31, 2012

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LED fashion, whether or not you like it, you'd better get used to it.

Maybe if I went to all-night raves with colorful little glowy sticks and jammed to Paul Oakenfold (uh oh, is he old already?) this maybe, somehow, would strike me as making sense. But then who cares what a tech blogger thinks about fashion. So decide for yourself: do you think LED eyeshadow is hot?

Or not?

An eccentric young lady has added to her eccentric assembly of creations a kind of eyeshadow made out of LED lights. The artist/researcher, Lulin Ding, says that she’d noticed how eyeshadow is only visible when a woman (or rock stars) blink. She wanted to turn the eyelid into a digital medium by illuminating it while it is closed.

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The lights hang in the corner of the eye, suspended from wires woven delicately – and from the looks of it, difficultly – through the eye lashes. The wires run back over the ear and down the shoulder, eventually clipping onto a LilyPad Arduino microcontroller board commonly used to power “e-textiles.”

Whether or not you like the e-shadow, my guess is that you’re bound to see them sooner or later. The alluring surface of the female eyelid is just the latest part of the body or clothing to be “painted” with LED light. LED lights have been woven into dresses, high heels, shoelaces, and they’ve been used to brighten our smiles. They’ve even been used already to give eyelashes, quite literally, that irradiant glow. Never mind it’s probably insanely annoying to have a bright light – or three – just millimeters from your eyeball. But, as we know, people will sacrifice much in the name of fashion, so we’re probably going to have to get used to it. The ravers among us, probably sooner than most.

[image credits: DTK Austin]
images: LED Eyeshadow
video: Lulin Ding

Peter Murray was born in Boston in 1973. He earned a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore studying gene expression in the neocortex. Following his dissertation work he spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at the same university studying brain mechanisms of pain and motor control. He completed a collection of short stories in 2010 and has been writing for Singularity Hub since March 2011.

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