How concerned are you about sunlight exposure?

HoofHearted

HoofHearted

Flat Foot Peachy
Joined
Jun 16, 2023
Messages
159
The ideal conditions for keeping ponies is in a cool, dry, place away from direct sunlight, but of course, we all want a nice-looking display somewhere special where we can see them. I used to keep most of my ponies in the closet and the ones on display were easy to keep in dark areas, but my new room is much brighter. It has a large window that bathes the room in sunshine for much of the day. I want my ponies out and about, and I know they won't instantly leak plasticizer and fade if sunshine touches them, but I want to keep these ponies in good shape for a long, long, time.

For my question, how concerned are you about sunlight exposure on your collection? Does your pony room get natural light? Do you do anything to mitigate the ill-effects of UV or have you not had any ill-effects in keeping your collection where the sun can hit them?
 
Interesting question , I will follow it.
Before collect plastic ponies , I collect joint dolls in polymer clay, so I always had to keep them away from direct UV sunlight . I kept them all the time in a closet, in summer, and in winter, due the few light of sun, I could keep them more outside. But effectively, i dont like to keep my collection always hidden in the closet.
For my ponies, Im still at the beginning of collection , so I have only 3. I was thinking to keep them in a room , esposed outside closet but in a room where I use only artificial light.
At the same time, If I read some solutions , I would like to keep them in my room. In summer my room is very bright at least for all the morning , the sun enter inside the room ! And the sun is strong here.
I wonder if there is some uv lights trasparent filters to place in front of ponies.. but there is need an expert that can tell about the plastic and sunlights effect. I dont know if it ruin only the plastic due the UV lights or even a normal light filtered , yet would "fade" the colors... probably the only safe light is the artificial lamps ...
 
I have shades in my new pony room and keep them closed all the time. But, I didn't always have a space like that for them, and they don't seem to have been terribly affected by getting a little sun now and then. I do have a couple that I bought from someone who must have kept them right on a window sill because one side is pale grey and the other side is....whatever color the pony was originally. I think there is a blue and a purple one. So, the sun can damage them in extreme situations. But just being in a well lit room shouldn't hurt them too much, as long as they aren't in direct sunlight for long periods of time.
 
I tend to keep the curtains open in the lounge (where I display mine) however my collection is displayed to the side, so they don't get hit by direct sunlight. I haven't been collecting for very long (got my first pony in March 2024) but I haven't noticed any fading or issues with where mine are kept :)

When we eventually move, I'd love to have a dedicated display room and could end up with more sunlight on the ponies. You can get UV window film and it looks like it'll make the room a little darker, but I'd definitely love to pick those up - worth it to protect the ponies and other things I'll be keeping on display! :)
 
It doesn’t concern me at all, I keep all my ponys just in my bedroom which gets a regular amount of sunlight and has fairly transparent curtains :)
I’ve done that since I was like 9 (not in the same house but same basic conditions) and don’t notice any fading at all so I don’t worry about it. I mean I wouldn’t keep one on the windowsill or anything, but just in a room with sunlight is fine with me
 
I think I might be a bit paranoid about mine. I have a wall of them out in my bedroom, but the fading pink and anything else I suspect of being delicate lives in the drawers under my bed. They come out regularly, but I tend to keep the curtains drawn in the morning when the sun is on that side of the house.
 
I get really paranoid about light hitting my ponies but other than one or two with fading pink hair I don't think I've seen any real issues. I keep them all in a room with a window at the center of the outer wall, but the only light that comes through it is what is peeking around the sides since I keep the main part of the window covered at all times. I had a plush firmly against one side of the window where the light was coming through for a while and when I finally got worried and moved her she didn't seem faded at all.
 
I cover both my bedroom windows with blackout curtains, have for some time now. For the sake of my ponies and other toys too.
 
Not very paranoid with "normal" ponies, very paranoid with fading-pink-hair ponies, lol. I just looked at one of my shelves and, yep, Baby Lickety Split and Honeysuckle have white hair now. That shelf is out of the way and gets minimal sunlight, but it does get some. I wish I had a pony room with no windows!
 
I don't have enough adequate storage anymore so some of my ponies are in a cabinet that can be closed and some are on a bookshelf in my room, however, the way everything is positioned, the ponies can never get direct light. I have a Pinwheel I got on ebay who clearly was left either in a window or something because she's faded on her non display side. Princess Serena is my only fading pink hair pony with any hint of pink left and she lives in the cabinet. I recently got a TAF Sundance who still had some pink left but almost all of it faded to white while I was working on fixing her yellowed head, despite the fact that I had all her hair very carefully covered. Can't win them all!
 
I keep my blinds shut to my pony room at all times. But, honestly, that's not so much for the ponies as it is for myself seeing as I have a lower tolerance for sunlight than they do :lolpony:

Most ponies will be fine in a room that gets sunlight so long as they're not standing in direct sunlight - like in a window that gets a lot of direct sunlight for several hours in a day. The only ones I'd take extra precautions with are, like others have mentioned, the ones with pink hair and the likes that has a habit of fading real fast. Those I'd try to keep away completely from any possible sunlight.
 
All of my buildings suffer sun bleach, grew yellowed. Many of them have paint melting off.
I tried to store them in a dark container and closing my bind. I doubt it can degrade even more, but it seems all damage doesn't worsen.

The ponies seem to do much better, because they are small enough to be stored in clean shoe boxes.

The worse one is Minty (Evening wear) whose body yellowed and losing all pink in her mane, and Styling Star catcher that her thermal-paint turns permanently weird pink.

It is tough here near the equator.

I still want to display them as a small town. I am not sure what to do, and I feel bad leaving them in dark boxes.
 
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It's not a bad idea to put UV reflective film on the windows in the room you want to display ponies in.

edit: honestly for any kind of collection it's a good idea. I like having my blurays on display in the den and after the windows get replaced I'll install film so the spines are less likely to fade.
 
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I have a dedicated pony room that has 1 window in it. Until a couple years ago that window just had mini blinds (which were always left closed) and a valance style curtain. Then one day upon rearranging some stuff I noticed discoloration on an area of my Perm Shoppe.

Now, this struck me as odd cause I bought my Perm Shoppe several ago and it was MIB. I opened it, applied the stickers and set it up on top of one of my bookcases that hold my ponies. So I can tell you for certain there was no discoloration on it. But the bookcase is tall and with the Perm Shoppe on top of it I couldn't have the little heart mirror that sits on top displayed upright, it wasn't enough room before it reached the ceiling, so I just had that heart resting on top of one of the side roof bits.

Fast forward several years to the aforementioned rearranging, when I took the Perm Shoppe down there was obvious discoloration where the heart mirror had rested on the top, the rest of the roof must've evenly started to fade a bit cause the area under where the heart lay was slightly darker.

Now I dunno if this was just from the limited light that came in through the window, even with blinds that always stayed closed. I think it's crazy how it still managed to discolor, on the other side of the room near the ceiling! But it did. And maybe it's not the light from the window, maybe it was from the light bulbs in the room?? I don't know enough about artificial light to say if that could've done it but once I found that I went ahead and put up blackout curtains. I hate not having the bit of natural light from the window but I found some adorable rainbow blackout curtains to make me feel a little better about it LOL
 
Gingerbread said:
I have a dedicated pony room that has 1 window in it. Until a couple years ago that window just had mini blinds (which were always left closed) and a valance style curtain. Then one day upon rearranging some stuff I noticed discoloration on an area of my Perm Shoppe.

Now, this struck me as odd cause I bought my Perm Shoppe several ago and it was MIB. I opened it, applied the stickers and set it up on top of one of my bookcases that hold my ponies. So I can tell you for certain there was no discoloration on it. But the bookcase is tall and with the Perm Shoppe on top of it I couldn't have the little heart mirror that sits on top displayed upright, it wasn't enough room before it reached the ceiling, so I just had that heart resting on top of one of the side roof bits.

Fast forward several years to the aforementioned rearranging, when I took the Perm Shoppe down there was obvious discoloration where the heart mirror had rested on the top, the rest of the roof must've evenly started to fade a bit cause the area under where the heart lay was slightly darker.

Now I dunno if this was just from the limited light that came in through the window, even with blinds that always stayed closed. I think it's crazy how it still managed to discolor, on the other side of the room near the ceiling! But it did. And maybe it's not the light from the window, maybe it was from the light bulbs in the room?? I don't know enough about artificial light to say if that could've done it but once I found that I went ahead and put up blackout curtains. I hate not having the bit of natural light from the window but I found some adorable rainbow blackout curtains to make me feel a little better about it LOL
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I work in a retail store and we have some items we sell in large quantities so we keep even larger quantities on shelf. A few years ago we discovered that a certain type of screen print ink was fading on shirts inside our stockroom. The only light in there is fluorescent. So I definitely think artificial light can also cause fading of some things! But it seems weird!
 
CloudDreamer said:
The only light in there is fluorescent. So I definitely think artificial light can also cause fading of some things! But it seems weird!
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Artificial or natural doesn't really matter, what matters is spectrum and intensity. If the light source emits on a wavelength a material is sensitive to, there's going to be an impact regardless of whether the light source is natural or not. And evidently, that ink was sensitive to some part of the spectrum emitted by the fluorescent lamps.

The thing about sunlight is it hits a fairly broad spectrum and at substantial intensity (even filtered through our atmosphere), an intensity most household lighting is nowhere near in the same league as.

Industrial fluorescent lamps aren't sunlight, but they're still more intense than common household lighting.
 
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I wonder what type of interior light bulbs would be best for pony rooms then? I have a ceiling fan in there and it has 3 standard light bulb sockets, to be honest I've just been putting whatever bulbs we had, I think there might even be 1 or 2 old incandescent bulbs that are still going from before everything switched to LED. For a long time my husband had a thing where he was always buying bulbs when he found them on clearance so we had a little stockpile of various types which I think we've finally just about worked through LOL
 
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