Undercover Colors

Ankesh Madan, Stephen Grey, Tasso Von Windheim and Tyler Confrey-Maloney are undergraduate students at North Carolina State University. The foursome have invented a nail polish called “Undercover Colors” that changes color when it detects common date rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB (Gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid) present in a person's drink.

The team of four students won the Lulu eGames student competition, which was sponsored by North Carolina State’s Entrepreneurship Initiative to "challenge students to design working solutions to real-world problems", the prize was seed funding for their new venture Undercover Colors. The four students were all majors in Materials Science & Engineering. Much of the research for Undercover Colors was done at a lab at NC State's College of Veterinary Medicine where DEA scheduled drugs were allowed for research purposes and the team's faculty adviser was Nathaniel Finney, an organic chemistry professor at the university

How Undercover Colors Work

 Imagine you are at a bar or party and someone offers to buy you a drink, or perhaps you have been on the dance floor dancing and have left your drink unattended. What if your drink was somehow spiked with a date rape drug without your knowledge? A "date rape drug" is one of many substances that after ingesting could leave you incapacitated and unable to fend of unwanted sexual advances.

There are several products on the market that can detect the presence of an unwanted substance in your drink. For example, the Anti Date-Rape Strawinvented in Israel by Fernando Patolsky and Michael Ioffe. Undercover colors is a similar product that comes in the form of a nail polish, a combination of chemistry and cosmetics.

Quite simply, the person wearing the nail polish stirs (or perhaps discreetly dips) the nail polished finger into the drink in question. If any of the date rape drugs that Undercover Colors is able to detect is present in the drink the nail polish will change color to alert you.

The Controversy

As of this writing, none of several similar anti-date rape drug detection products are widely available for consumers to buy. The products need to increase their efficiency (less false positives, less failures to detect) and increase the number of possible drugs detectable. While other critics such as theHuffington Post state that

"well intentioned, products like "Undercover Colors" actually perpetuate rape culture by placing the burden of safety back onto women. Let's stop getting distracted by gimmicks like this and talk about real solutions to the growing violence against women."

According the inventors of Undercover Colors,

Through this nail polish and similar technologies, we hope to make potential perpetrators afraid to spike a woman’s drink because there’s now a risk that they can get caught. In effect, we want to shift the fear from the victims to the perpetrators. We are Undercover Colors and we are the first fashion company empowering women to prevent sexual assault.

An admirably statement, however, how many rapes and sexual assaults involve a date rape drug? Ninety percent of the time a drug is involved with date rape, alcohol was that drug.

Well I agree with Huffington that the issues surrounding rape should be addressed, discussed, and acted upon by our society. However, I disagree that the availability of an invention that detects a date rape drug would put the burden of safety back on the victim. The perpetrator is and always has been the problem. And women need to be aware that too much alcohol consumption can also put them in a vulnerable position.

تصنيف : Inventors