UNDARK

People often like to think outrageous trends and fads are a side effect of modern day situations & social climates, but popularizing things in that way in fact seems to be more due to human nature in of itself. Sensational obsessions overtaking the masses have swept across countless generations, all throughout human history, repeating similar patterns, as well as usually fading out eventually in time.

Many trends are rather arbitrary, or about glorifying a certain particular thing, such as the rich's love of gold and silk, pretty much anything precious throughout history. In the twentieth century, around the time refrigerators first came about, gelatin took the United States by storm.
Everyday people relished in being able to show off having a fridge, and gelatin was becoming increasingly popular thanks to it, they would marvel at pretty much gelatin anything, even if absurd by today's standards.

Not every fad is quite innocuous, though, as now well-known by dangerously irresponsible challenges pushed by social media. That scourge of the dark side of crazes has been with us for far longer than the age of apps or even modern technology, however.

Around the same time gelatin became prevalent, a new sensation was on the rise too, something of which was discovered by Marie & Pierre Curie in 1898. This was a huge discovery of those times, and as time went on, it would prove it unwittingly set off one deadly infatuation which would have horrific effects for those unfortunate for decades to come.

Radium seemingly came almost out of nowhere, it by many was quickly deemed to be extraordinary & magnificent. Even by doctors then, it went scarily grossly misunderstood. Surface level testing was done, and it was rapidly touted to be almost something of dreams.
Not much was really known about it back then, but that absolutely did not stop the eventual growing radium craze which flooded the early 1900s. It even made its way commercially, available to almost everyone, and put in countless imaginable goods & products.

For a long time, that fateful element was almost like gold. Undoubtedly, it achieved legendary status by a huge population of US citizens alone. It was touted by trusted medical professionals in those days to have marvelous health benefits, quite like a cure-all, and even stuff of miracles.

Many couldn't get enough, radium was soon put in anything from glassware to even toothpaste. Some even visited apparent lavish spas featuring the key ingredient, to experience the wondrous properties.
From a modern day perspective, this all might sound expectedly silly, the long list of dangers from radiation is now well documented, and the novelty seen as twisted & sad. However, it could very much well be in ways understood. There is the saying that technology from the future could be indistinguishable from magic.

By all accounts, this falls along those lines. Radium glowed when added to the right material, an unreal tantalizing shade of green, it could definitely be seen as to why anyone thought it could be magical. For that matter, if you brought a simple lightbulb to even the 18th century and demonstrated how it worked, you would most likely be decried as a witch or called a sorcerer, let alone if you showed a smartphone.

Luckily, for the majority of consumers, the amount of radium put into things was too little to have ill effects if exposed to normally. Repeated use, and huge love of it would then have problems, though.
Unfortunately on that note, many workers subjected to repeated exposure to it weren't so lucky. Radium had other applications and uses other than simply being added to purchased items, during WW2, it widely became put into paint and applied to numerous dials & knobs. Radioactive material doesn't just glow, however, paint laced with radium glowed because of reactions with a phosphor it was mixed with.

Due to horrendous mixes of poor knowledge, and lack of care about safety of female workers, women who had jobs of painting with the glow in the dark paint in factories were left to endure horrendous futures. These ladies came to be known as the Radium Girls, and not for mainly good or lighthearted reasons.

After its creation, Undark became adopted by quite a few companies, for its properties of richly glowing and illuminating anything the paint is applied to. Women employed by those companies had to paint clock faces, dials, and such each meticulously by hand; in factories with no safety precautions to speak of.

Because they painted by hand, they were all instructed to lick their brushes to bring the ends back to a fine point after each stroke. As a result, over time they inevitably ingested worrying amounts of radium. So it went on for years of repeated exposure of that harmful substance, for a long while, without any care at all.
The Radium Girls often also had the misfortune of being into the radium fad as a whole, as well. In fact, many like them were drawn to the prospect of working at those fateful factories completely for that reason. Women flocked to be painters to just be around radium, to get to bask in the mystical properties as much as they could.

It wasn't enough that they often experienced parts of their clothes, hair, or exposed body parts glowing because of subjection to the material. To make matters worse, they would often paint their nails, coat dresses in it for parties, and even use it in makeup. They wouldn't realize the extremely dire consequences of their actions until far too late, since while on the outside, they appeared fine. On the inside though, it would prove that the radiation was slowly but surely eating them from the inside out.

Their lives were changed forever years on, in the most gruesome and devastating of ways possible, in a lot of cases. Many of them could expect to develop cancer as they got older as a result of the radiation, as well as bones becoming brittle & worse because radium gets absorbed similarly to calcium in the human body. Some lost practically their entire jaw due to something coined as radium jaw, the radiation caused bone to deteriorate, eating away at it, in some cases disintegrating areas of bone entirely.

Worse still, a lot of them painfully died rather young, while doctors didn't take them or their conditions seriously at all. Those in charge medically refused to believe radiation had harmed them, and left them disfigured & dying. It would also come about the corporations which employed them did indeed at least somewhat know radium could be potentially dangerous, as lab workers were given safety gear to help protect themselves, meanwhile the Radium Girls weren't.

Corporations like the United States Radium Corporation began going to extreme lengths to make sure their truth was pushed above all, even though it was nothing but fallacies to protect their reputation and sell their products. They would get research done to show the opposite of what was going on, and peddled as real facts, that radium was completely safe. The president of US Radium even publicly disparaged & desecrated the women, their fight, and accused them of merely being just after money.
Radium Dial took it even further into insidious territory, going to vile lengths to cover up the reality of the situation. Stealing and destroying evidence, taking the bones of the deceased, tampering with autopsies, nothing was seemingly out of the question for the twisted officials of the company.

In time, some semblance of justice finally came, as then surviving former workers refused to give up trying to get their story heard, and get action taken. Albina Larice, Quinta McDonald, Grace Fryer, Edna Hussman, and Katherine Schaub--five--led the charge in a lawsuit against Radium Dial in New Jersey, and settled at last in 1928. No matter the huge hurdles thrown at them, or putrid filth said about them in order to get them disregarded all together, those brave girls marched on valiantly.

Sadly, while they did win compensation for their troubles, nothing could ever make up for what many of those women had to endure, mostly out of negligence & need for profit. None of the vigilant ladies of the harrowing lawsuit survived two years afterwards. They didn't fight for themselves, it was long too late for that, they fought for the lives and well-being of many female workers undervalued in countless ways who could've just as easily been in their shoes instead.

They wouldn't live on in person, but they would always be remembered. The Radium Women were denied their brilliant futures, who undoubtedly could've led beautiful lives; all for to many, was known deceptively as beautiful radium.
Grimly, after their victory, people called them the five who were doomed to die, with their fates long sealed. In turn, it makes another one of their nicknames of the factory days more morbid and eery, the Ghost Girls. They were called that then due to being illuminated by the radium infused paint, which in time caused their lights to fade away gradually.

All things fade in time, so did the watch faces, instruments, and anything else coated in the paint. The things painted with it tended to lose their glow after only a few years, which seemed like another instance in why it wasn't worth all the despair it had caused. At least, as consolation, the Radium Corporation and others were held accountable after the settlement & had to introduce safety regulations to their workers who handled the radioactive paint.

Even if too late, change did come, and the Radium Girls managed to inflict such for the better. Their case was the first to bring laws protecting the safety of employees all across the country, and to make sure nothing like this should ever be allowed to happen again. Companies had to start making sure workplaces were fit and compliant with newly developed series of regulations & standards everywhere.

As time went on, radium quickly fizzled out of fashion, and eventually too, the Radium Corporation went along with it. That's only fitting given what grotesque deaths at least fifty women had to suffer because of their choices. Radium would join the likes of lead, mercury, asbestos, amongst countless other harmful substances throughout time that widely were misunderstood and made their way into popular use.
Another consolation is that the Radium Girls ultimately ended up as invaluable test subjects for science to help understand the long-term effects of exposure to radiation, and radiation poisoning overall. You can't bring them back, but at least in a way, they managed to save the lives of many the knowledge helped in the years to come.

Radiation continues to prove to almost be humanity's Kyptonite, much like the latter is the weakness of Superman. Yet, much like his sight, radiation can't penetrate lead, and can be contained relatively safely. There are ways to handle radiation with minimal risk, and even various positive uses for it in the right hands. In the medical and science field, it proves invaluable, it also could provide the world with electricity.
Of course in the wrong hands, like with many things, it can be weaponized, but it doesn't have to be that way. Also, to this day, people still believe microwaves are dangerous. It just goes to show, ignorance will continue to persist on, but it doesn't have to be the norm. We can learn from the mistakes of the past and better, protect others out of good will. If only the unfortunate weren't taken advantage of in the name of greed.

The tragedy of the legacy that was the Radium Girls, Ghost Girls, or the five doomed to die, is an important one. Unfortunately, unless it is continued to be talked about, it too is doomed to fade away within time. Their importance, and sacrifices, shouldn't be forgotten. Their tales, unlike their unimaginable pain, should continue to be remembered. The women who radiated with a brilliant green light, in several instances, undark even after death.