The color of swimsuit your child wears swimming in SC could save his or her life. Here’s why
With South Carolina under a heat advisory, chances are at least one member of your family wants to get to the pool or beach as fast as they can.
There are an insurmountable number of reasons why water safety is important for children and adults alike and that includes the color of your swimsuit.
Whether you grew up swimming every day or are still learning how to swim, it’s important to know the proper precautions to take to avoid injury or death while enjoying a fun day in the water, especially in South Carolina.
With 2,876 miles of tidal coastline, South Carolina has many more swimming opportunities than just backyard or country club pools. Whether swimming in the ocean or the neighborhood pool, it’s important to consider color when choosing a swimsuit for you or your child.
Optimal swimsuit color depends on the type of water your family members will be swimming in.
Alive Solutions, a company that specializes in aquatic safety, conducted a study that put different swimsuit colors to the test to see how their visibility varied in different colored pool bottoms and in open water.
For dark-bottomed pools, testing found that bright and contrasting options were the top color choices to keep both children and adults safe, with neon yellow, green and orange as the top three choices.
For light-colored pool bottoms, avoid anything light-colored.
“Our bottom two colors are white and light blue (check out how they disappear) and our top choices would be neon pink and neon orange,” Alive Solutions said in a post on their website.
As for open water such as the ocean or lakes, the study tested 18 inches of water with visibility around zero at 2 feet for all colors in the environment on a partly sunny day. The company found that the top performing colors were neon yellow, green and orange, showing that bright and contrasting colors were still a key component. The color white came in fourth place in the study but appeared as more of a cloudy light reflection and wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Additionally, unlike the previous studies, the neon pink color did not perform as well as it had in the white-bottom pool environment.
It’s also important to note that while neon yellow was said to be a noticeable color, beachgoers may want to keep in mind the thoughts behind shark safety as well.
“Yum yum yellow” has been a term coined by many.
“Rescue workers and other water frequenters like scuba divers started referring to the shade of yellow as what it is known as now because of its tendency to attract sharks; especially to lone or stranded swimmers,” according to Deep Blue Diving.
“Researchers and divers suggest avoiding colors such as white or any other reflective colors that may shine light much like fish scales do underwater. You also want to avoid anything with a high contrast color. Sharks can see such a high contrast color outfit very well and might get attracted to it.”
Deep Blue Diving continued by writing that even jewelry and watches should be avoided when swimming underwater as they can reflect light and replicate the scales of a fish, thus attracting sharks and other predators.
Four years ago, Jei Turrell, then 10 years old, was attacked in ankle-deep water off a Palmetto Dunes beach on Hilton Head Island.
Tonya Turrell, his mother, posted about the immense pain her son was enduring from the injury, the trauma of remembering the attack and his disappointment that his fishing trip was curtailed. She also advised parents to avoid bright-colored swimwear that may attract a shark’s attention., as previously reported by The Island Packet.
“People keep asking how many stitches Jei has. We don’t know. The doctor doesn’t even know. Too many to count. ... There are a lot of stitches on the outside and even more on the inside,” Turrell posted about the incident.
