Mood Rings - 1970's Fashion That Put Your Feelings On Your Finger

Remember those groovy rings that promised to reveal your deepest emotions with a simple shift in color? In this episode, we dive into the fascinating, and often misunderstood, world of mood rings! Join us as we explore why these whimsical pieces of jewelry captured the imaginations of so many, becoming a quintessential accessory of the 70s and beyond. We'll uncover the surprisingly simple science behind their alleged mind-reading abilities, delving into what they were actually made of (spoiler alert: it's not magic!). And of course, the burning question remains: were mood rings ever truly accurate, or were they just a fun, colorful trick of the light? Tune in to find out if your childhood accessory was a genuine emotional barometer or just a stylish piece of novelty!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:07

Yeah, Alex, how you feeling today? Hey buddy, how's it going? Uh I'm doing well. I'm doing well, but I'm just kind of curious, what kind of mood are you in? Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Mood. Yeah. Um, well, uh are you gonna talk about mood rings? Are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:30

I am, yes. I guess I shouldn't have used the word mood because it gave it away, huh? No, it's fine. Maybe you talk about the moody blues. I'm talking about mood rings because they are what we call a dead end. Something that used to be popular but isn't anymore.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Do you remember mood rings? Yeah, and so what I like about dead ends is we have our producer Chris here, who's uh younger than us. Yeah, about 10, 15 years younger than us? 20. Yeah. Often doesn't even know what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Does he know what mood rings are? Chris, do you know what mood rings are? Oh, he has one. Oh. Alright. Well, you know, they were also called truth rings because they were supposed to bring out the truth in you. Okay. Um, did you ever have one? Me? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

No. No? Um never interested in them. Now I'm fascinated with Chris having one, but I'm not interested in having one myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

There there was a guy named Josh Reynolds and another guy named uh Maris Ambatz, and they were credited with inventing the mood ring. Uh, you want to take a guess at the year that they kind of became popular?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Seems like a 60s, 70s kind of thing. Yeah. I'm gonna guess 1967. 75.

unknown 1:50

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

75 in New York. This was a little post-hippie time. Um there was also a um jewelry designer that it's also kind of came out with them at the same time. But the the thing that they used is they used this thermo chromatic um temperature sensing material that had been mixed with um mixed with other material to to make these mood stones. And the whole thing was they changed color based on the wearer's finger temperature. So warmer would make it change one color, cooler would make it change another. And it really kind of caught on during the 70s. It was very popular.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

You know, if I had been older, if I had been older when they came out, I might have been more into it. But, you know, not much for me there as a little kid. But now it it would be kind of a cool thing. If those came back, I'd probably be into that.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

They did they did have a good run, but they definitely fell away pretty quickly. Some of the people that made them would make them in um out of or or apply these uh thermochromic liquid crystal stones onto silver or onto gold. And so really the the material that would sense your temperature and change color, that in itself wasn't that expensive. It was where it was um placed, you know, what kind of material they were used for the actual ring itself that made the difference. But these things also didn't have a very long shelf life. That this um thermochrome chromic uh liquid crystal only would work for a year or two before it would just kind of like lose its. It was one of these things where kind of like a helium balloon, you know, if you have a helium balloon in your house, uh a couple of days later it starts to droop.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

But in the tech world they call that planned obsolescence, right? You want things to not last forever, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

That's why you can't get to the battery in your iPhone.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yeah, that's that's true. Maybe they were ahead of their time with this planned absolute obsolescence. Now, do you know the different color meanings of the mood ring?

SPEAKER_01 3:59

Well, first of all, let me ask, was there really any science back behind this? Like No.

SPEAKER_00 4:05

It doesn't seem possible. No, no science whatsoever. It it all it had to do with was your temperature. And so supposedly if you were more stressed out, um your temperature might go up a little bit, right? You've got a little higher blood pressure, your temperature's going up.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Um would the external temperature also affect it? Because I would think that if you're down here where we live, it would all it would never get to those cool temperatures, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:31

It would always be in the the That's a good question, whether or not it was an absolute temperature or relative to what it had been. I I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Or really just on your your galvanic skin temperature, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:45

Yeah, yeah. Because you're supposed to be 98.6 generally, right? The human human body.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Um So I'm guessing that the red was probably the like anxiety or anxious or no red was actually passionate, aroused, or angry. Okay. Okay. Well, uh that's a wide range of things, though, right? That's a wide range. If your girlfriend, uh her ring is red, you could either it's really good or really bad.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Right, right, right. It it wasn't exact. It was not exact at all. It was I guess you'd call it almost like a uh generalization. It was kind of a all right, it's gonna get you in the ballpark of how this person feels, right? Um either hates you or loves you.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

That's not really the ballpark, but I get you.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

Apparently you could turn gray, which would be nervous or anxious. Um do you remember blue? Blue was kind of a common color for for um mood rings. Our our babysitter, when I was a little kid, um Brenda Beulot, she had a she had a mood ring, and I remember she was really proud of it. This was in, you know, early well, I guess late 70s, 78, 79. Uh blue was calm, relaxed, and peaceful.

SPEAKER_01 5:57

Oh wow. If she had if did you ever see that as the person you were she was taking care of? I bet you never saw that.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Oh yeah, yeah. She liked to show it to us because she said when it started changing colors it was our fault because we were being bad. That was oh wow. And you bought into that. Oh yeah, oh yeah. That's that's my biggest uh experience with the mood ring. And I she was she was a you know, pretty girl. She was probably 16, 17, and I was seven or eight years old, and and she's got this blue, calm, peaceful uh mood ring on. Well, um yellow was excited or optimistic. Uh green was normal, average, like green was kind of middle of the road. I'm guessing there was a scale of colors here, right? They kind of went from the the cooler shades to the warmer shades. Sure. Um and so green was kind of right in the middle. Orange was energetic, excited, or adventurous. Um, pink was happy, content, or romantic. Purple was romantic, sensual, or mystical.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

I'm surprised there was such a wide range of these things. I would have expected that they basically always looked brown, and you couldn't ever interpret it one way or the other. Brown wasn't a choice, actually. Yeah, but uh that's what I mean is that I would think they would always be like indeterminate. Like I'm looking at the mood ring, I can't really tell what color it is. Right. Because it isn't a it's it's like a a prism, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:23

It's no, no, it's it's this um it's this material that i if you've ever seen a thermochromic um strip, sometimes these things are used to place on something to take a temperature of something. Sure. Uh it's the same, it's a liquid crystal kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 7:42

But what I mean is it's not digital where it's gonna come up as one definite color.

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Right, right. It's it's it's blending different uh colors together to make a color. So you're right. Yeah. It might be a little hard to read. But I'm surprised that it goes all the way from yellow to purple. Yeah, yellow to purple. Um sometimes it could even look clear. And clear meant bored, distracted, or confused. If you had a clear mood ring. Um you now where would you buy a mood ring, do you think, in the 1970s? Before Amazon, before Spencer Gifts, maybe? Yeah, I was gonna say novelty stores was a big place. Um some higher-end mood rings were available in jewelry stores and department stores, you know. Uh they jumped on the trend for a while, you know, the Macy's of the world, the Sears and Robuck of the world, the Montgomery Wards of the world. They all they all jumped on the on the bandwagon and for a few years had mood rings. But if you really wanted to get a cheap mood ring, you could actually get them out of gumball machines.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Oh, those probably were really cheap.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

Yeah, yeah. Um literally and figuratively. I think 25 cents, 50 cents, and you'd get yourself. Did you have one? Um, I think I had a couple out of gumball machines, sure. Sure. Yeah. Um they were worn by some pretty highfalutin' people in the 70s, though. If you remember a little singer named Barbara Streisand, she had she had a mood ring. She was a big proponent of the mood rings. I'm guessing our friend John DeLorean probably had one. Oh, I'll bet he had them on all his fingers. Every finger. Five five on each hand.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

I'm guessing Evil Can Evil had one.

SPEAKER_00 9:20

Yeah, except his was just on the middle finger. And he would he would give it to you as he went by. What would have mood what would hit a bit? Just always angry? Oh, evil? No, I think I think if there was one for uh cool, you know, like just cool and collected. Um Sophia Loren, she was she was someone that um advocated for the mood stones, the mood rings. Um and then more recently, I learned that Harry Stiles is is big in the mood rings.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Oh, so he and Chris caught him on the comeback.

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Yeah, yeah. They're they're they're repping the the comeback of the mood ring. Dua Lipa, if you know who that is, she's of course she's big on and then someone I'd never heard of, Zendaya. Oh yeah, yeah. Zendaya's big on the mood rings too. Yeah, cool. So would you ever consider wearing a mood ring now if it actually was accurate? Like if it could actually do what it claims to do, do you think it could be a useful tool?

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Um, I think a lot of those wearables already have tools like that, like the Auras, is that the R rings, yeah, yeah. Um and Apple Watch can give you some information like that, right? Some of the some of the more high-tech wearables. I don't think I would want to literally wear my emotions on my finger. I wouldn't want other people to know the mood I'm in.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Okay. So so like I'm sitting here and you see my my mood ring is uh is you know shows that I'm angry while we're doing this, you're like, hey man, what's going on?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

And then I think I'm in touch with my emotions enough where I know what mood I'm in. So I'm not sure it would give me any information that I don't already have access to.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

That's that's pretty in touch with your emotions if you you know what mood you're in. You know what I mean? I mean, what kind of person wouldn't know what mood they were in?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Then why do you need the mood ring? Is it just a brag like, hey, look, I'm aroused?

SPEAKER_00 11:21

That's a different kind of ring, Alex. I'm I'm visibly aroused. Look at me. It's fake. Uh I don't know. I I think it was one of those things where it was an early version of the wearable. And and like you said, it was something that people at the time there wasn't tech really involved, it was just a basic chemical reaction that would happen. People would wear it, it was kind of a hippie thing. Um yeah, I I I feel like that's one of those things that had a nice little run, but probably glad that it's gone.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Yeah, to me, it's kind of in the same category as lava lamps and beanbag chairs. Now, beanbag chairs, they're actually pretty practical. Sure, but it's all kind of in the same 70s. Yeah, it came out around the same time, has the same kind of demographic. Beanbag chairs probably lasted a little longer, but I digress. Maybe we'll talk about those another time.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Yeah, yeah. We we certainly should. Well, that's that's all I got on um on the old mood ring. Hopefully, uh that's episode puts you in a good mood, and uh we'll see you next time when we talk about an interesting dead person.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

In the summer beauty was right back to the metal dream Blue was all black on the dream Red bird hot Black Watch the hot Blue Brings in all the moon Black Both Disney Bulls on the last place that we've got some seeds frowned with the dreamer, they all know a glass of jaws, they use the group they shot of the use, blue ring tall shots, blue big on the roots, and boots, flash of colours, the crown, a moose of loud, blue cloud, a collab in a space, one stars with stall and face, blue stones, blue green scrown big queen, a green of two in a soul, the green of two and crab, the blue flour, blue and crab, glass in a space one, blue wings, we're gonna bring us to the