The Ultimate Performance Of Safety Vests

Typically, a pedestrian is struck by a motor vehicle somewhere in the world every 8 minutes. 5,600 people are wiped out each year by vehicles and another 80,000 are seriously injured - many of them while crossing streets or intersections. Nonetheless, only a small percentage of these cases are people who spend much of their time near moving vehicles: road workers.



And this is due largely in part to the simple implementation of protective vests. Safety vests are merely light weight vests worn over normal clothing, with bright fluorescent colors just like orange or yellow, and usually with specially designed reflective strips - all developed to make the wearer as visible to the human eye as humanly possible in as many situations and environments as possible. The first component of safety vests making them visible is simply their color.



To have a high degree of visibility, it's clear to go for brighter colors like orange and yellow, but there are other reasons behind these alternatives. The backgrounds in which a wearer operates are important. On open highways for instance, the vests worn by road workers are typically a vibrant orange to contrast with the two most mainly abundant colors: the dark green of trees or landscape beside the road, or the blue sky. Orange in particular is a complimentary color of blue - that is, its precise opposite on the color spectrum, making for the greatest contrast in between the two colors, and therefore, the greatest visibility.

This is the same reason why many signs and signals warning of construction or boundaries ahead are painted in the same color. The color yellow, and most of its associated shades and colorings are most likely to remain constant between those suffering from various kinds of color blindness. These protective equipment come in all different types, shapes, and of course sizes. The reflective strips found on safety vests are also the product of much research.



These are made up of retroreflectors, which reflect light with minimum dispersal back toward their source. However, unlike a mirror, retroreflectors can reflect light back in the direction of the source from an angle of incidence much greater than zero - meaning, the device doesn't need to be pointed directly at the light source in order to reflect light back toward it, as opposed to a mirror which must be positioned perfectly perpendicularly.



This really is normally achieve by arranging three mutually perpendicular mirrors to form a corner, much like three touching sides of a cube. This geometrical positioning allows light to be reflected towards its source from any direction. Obviously in the application of clothing, the "mirrors" in question are extremely tiny and made of reflective fibers or scotchlite, a material made of millions of tiny glass beads with a metallic reflective surface painted on one surface.



Together, these two simple applications considerably increase the visibility of those wearing safety vests, subsequently making their existence much more apparent and greatly lowering the risk of an incident.





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Article by Paul Wise. When it comes to safety protectors, Paul recommends wipermaster.com for great advice on protecting supplies for you.