Retro Collector vs. Retro Hardware - Round Two: Retr0Bright

By now, I suspect most retro game collectors have heard of "Retr0Bright," a chemical concoction of hydrogen peroxide, "oxy" laundry booster and gelling agents that can turn old, yellowed plastics back to their original color.  Retr0Bright isn't a commercial product; it's a recipe you mix together yourself, provided you're able to buy the ingredients.  The original Retr0Bright recipe calls for hydrogen peroxide at a strength roughly five times greater than what you can buy in most drugstores, although apparently beauty supply stores sell it in that concentration.  You can also order all the ingredients through Amazon.com.  (Some other online recipes claim that the less powerful peroxides will also work, with repeated applications.)

Mixing my own Retr0Bright is something I've wanted to try for a while now.  I have a few consoles and controllers that are looking downright sickly from the yellow discoloration.  I had a few days off from work over the holidays, so I finally decided to play mad scientist and mix up some noxious potions in my laboratory (aka my kitchen).  I purchased 15% hydrogen peroxide and xanthan gum from Amazon, and glycerine and generic-brand "oxy" laundry booster from local grocery and drug stores.  Total cost including shipping was probably about $25 (leaving me with a whole bunch of leftover "oxy" to freshen up my laundry).

Mixing the gel isn't difficult; just a few seconds with the blender is all you need.  Remember that hydrogen peroxide, especially at this strength, is quite caustic.  I wore splash goggles and latex gloves just to be safe.  After mixing, you are left with a sticky off-white paste that can be safely stored in a dark container.  I put mine in an old plastic tub covered with duct tape. 

You're not supposed to add the "oxy" until you are ready to actually use the gel.  That means you need to prepare your consoles (or whatever yellowed plastics you're treating) first.  You should clean them thoroughly to remove any dirt or other contaminants from the plastic's surface.  Since this was my first time using Retr0Bright, I didn't want to risk damaging any of my favorite pieces.  I selected my "backup" SNES console, which I picked up for free at an SC3 party, and which had only moderate discoloration.  The other item I selected for my first Retr0Bright run was an NES 2 dogbone controller with severe yellowing.  This thing was so badly discolored that I couldn't possibly make it any worse.

My yellowed dogbone controller,
shown next to a modern reproduction
so you can see the color contrast.

My backup SNES. The yellowing
on this was actually a little more
severe than this photo indicates.

I cleaned both items and took apart the dogbone so that I could apply the gel to just the controller's outer shell.  I also covered the SNES's Power and Reset buttons with tape to protect them.  Then I prepared the gel itself.  I knew from reading the Retr0Bright wiki that "oxy" doesn't really dissolve in the gel mixture; you need to pre-dissolve it in a small amount of hot water first.  Even with this trick, I found dissolving the "oxy" to be one of the more difficult parts of the entire endeavor.  I stirred it and stirred it and was still left with several undissolved crystals.  Eventually I decided it had dissolved as much as it was going to, and I added it to the gel mixture I had made earlier.  (For this first run, I didn't need to use all the gel, so I put a smaller portion of it into a glass bowl before adding the "oxy."  The rest of the gel I kept in my duct-taped tub.)  Then I painted the gel onto my controller and SNES using a cheap paintbrush, covered the gel-coated items with plastic wrap, and left them out in the Southern California sunshine on top of an old towel in my back patio.

This picture was taken about two hours in.  Note the "oxy" foam.

After about two hours in the sun, I checked the items.  They seemed less yellow, although it was hard to tell for certain in the bright sunlight and through the gummy gel.  The gel seemed to have dried up a bit, as the wiki warned it would.  So I wiped off my items with a wet towel and applied a fresh coat of activated gel.  It was at this point I discovered that the activated gel, which I had stored in a dark pantry, had increased in volume several times and was threatening to spill out of its container.  Luckily I had covered the bowl with plastic wrap, or else I'd have had quite a mess on my hands.  I painted new gel onto my items, covered them again, and let them sit in the sun again.

After about three hours, the items looked about right and the sun was going down anyway, so I declared the experiment complete.  I unwrapped the items, wiped them off with damp paper towels, and took a look.  Here's what I saw:

As you can see, the SNES is pretty much perfect!  The formerly yellowed areas have regained their original, bluish tint.  The area that was formerly covered up by a sticker (and hence had not yellowed) can no longer be seen – meaning that it is now the same color as the surrounding plastic.  This is a great result!

The dogbone controller is also improved, although not as perfect as the SNES.  Although the severe yellowing is totally gone now, there are still sections of plastic that are more yellow than others.  Some yellowing is clearly evident near the edges of the shell; I suspect this is because gravity caused some of the gel to drip off the edges during the UV-exposure period.  More worrisome are sections of bleached plastic.  This seems to be what the wiki refers to as "bloom" and can apparently happen if you leave the gel applied for too long a period of time.  Unfortunately, even though I monitored the items while they were baking in the sun, I didn't notice the "bloom" until I totally unwrapped them and cleaned off all the gel.  Still, when you consider how ugly this particular controller was before the Retr0Bright treatment, the difference is striking.  Even with the "bloom" it still looks much better than before.  This stuff really can work wonders!

That said, there were definitely some downsides to my experiences with Retr0Bright. In my next blog post, I'll describe my later Retr0Bright experiment, and go into some of the useful tips I discovered and some pitfalls I fell into.