Check Out These Safe Color Charts Before Buying the Next Swimsuit for Your Kids.
When choosing children’s swimwear for the season, we often think mainly of style, age appropriateness and comfort. We want something that they like, something that is not too mature and appropriate. But we may not be paying enough attention to another factor that can actually help them be safer in the water – the color of the suit.
ALIVE Solutions , a water safety, training and risk assessment company , tested over a dozen swimwear in different colors, first in the pool and then in the lake . The degree to which a swimsuit becomes difficult, if not impossible, to detect varied greatly depending on its color. Let’s first take a look at the swimwear in the pool, which ALIVE Solutions writes on its blog, had a light bottom:
The top photo in each section is underwater fabric and the bottom photo is surface wave fabric.
Our bottom two colors are white and blue (watch them fade away), and our best options are neon pink and neon orange.
The blog author also notes that while darker colors tend to show up against a lighter pool bottom, they avoid them because they might be mistaken for a pile of leaves, dirt, or shadow.
You might think you will get the same results in the lake , but you are only partly right:
We placed each color on the surface (first row images), the second row images were from the shore perspective, and the third row was from a slightly elevated position, simulating being on a boat / dock.
We ran our tests in an 18 “body of water – visibility was almost zero at 2 feet for all colors in this environment. The lake bottom was brownish gray and it was partially sunny outside.
Here, the top colors were neon yellow, neon green and bright orange, but not neon pink, which performed well in the pool test. However, brighter neon colors appear to be better overall, and these comparisons are a stark reminder that looking into water is very different from looking through air. Water distorts and reflects, and depending on the body of water or the depth of the person’s submersion, you may lose sight faster than you think.
Trained lifeguards will obviously look for a lot more than swimsuits of different colors and shades, but especially for the untrained eye, a brighter color suit can help you more quickly spot a child who has fallen into the water or noticed that he has been underwater. longer than they should be.
Whatever color your child’s swimsuit is, you must remember what it looks like when it starts playing in any type of water, be it a pool, ocean or lake. That way, if you find yourself looking for them later, you will have a clearer idea of what exactly you are looking for.
And of course, a child’s swimsuit color alone is not enough to keep them safe in the water. You can read more about this in our Child Safety Swimming Guide .