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The importance of ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometers!

Release Time： 2025-03-15 00:00:00.000

To create eye-catching products, companies use Optical Brightening Agents (OBAs), also known as Fluorescent Whitening Agents (FWAs), to make their products appear brighter and whiter.
While adding OBAs can create brighter products, adding these chemicals fundamentally alters how color is perceived, making accurate color assessment by eye impossible. Under factory lighting, materials and fabrics containing OBAs may appear similar in production, but these same goods may look vastly different under other lighting conditions (such as retail LEDs, daylight, or household incandescent lighting). Anyone responsible for assessing goods containing UV-brightening agents needs a UV spectrophotometer and light booth to quantify how OBAs affect color appearance under different light sources.

What is Ultraviolet (UV) Light?

Let's go back to elementary school science class. This is the visible light spectrum – the light we see with our eyes – and it's just a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

This is the electromagnetic spectrum. It starts with gamma rays on the far left, then moves right through X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves. The tiny visible light spectrum between ultraviolet and infrared light is the only part humans can see with the naked eye, unless OBAs are involved.
OBAs absorb a portion of invisible UV light and re-emit it as blue light. This reflected blue light makes fabrics appear brighter and whiter.

The right side of this graphic shows visible wavelengths, and the left side shows the UV region. Optical brightening agents work by absorbing these UV rays and emitting them into the visible spectrum for the human eye.

What is a UV Spectrophotometer?

Spectrophotometers quantitatively measure the amount of UV and visible light absorbed by a sample, allowing for the assessment of color consistency in products containing OBAs. These devices provide calibrated UV to measure and quantify this effect.

X-Rite UV Portable Spectrophotometers

The Ci64UV handheld sphere spectrophotometer features UV LED illumination to accurately quantify fluorescent whitening agents in plastics, textiles, and paper.

Ci64UV spectrophotometer measuring white plastic to assess the effect of optical brightening agents

X-Rite UV Benchtop Spectrophotometers

X-Rite’s Ci7820, Ci7800, and Ci7600 sphere benchtops offer UV illumination to quantify the effects of optical brightening agents on a variety of opaque and translucent samples.

X-Rite UV Inline Spectrophotometers

The ColorXRA 45 is a compact UV-calibrated 45°/0° inline non-contact spectrophotometer. It can be mounted above paper and plastic production lines to identify color variations early and throughout the production process.

Assessing OBAs Using a Light Booth

Optically brightened items can also be visually inspected under controlled UV lighting, such as that provided by the X-Rite SpectraLight QC light booth. Under UV light sources, items with higher OBA content will appear brighter, while items with less OBA will appear darker. The challenge is that you need a certain amount of UV to quantify the amount of OBA in a product. This means that when UV is low or absent, the color difference may be invisible. But when it is present, the color difference becomes very apparent.

Assessing white fabric samples containing optical brightening agents under UV light in the SpectraLight QC light booth

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