With just a stir of your cocktail with a finger, you can test your drink for drugs. This is how Undercover Colors, an innovative nail polish that switches colors when it comes in contact with date rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax, and GHB works.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, every two minutes sexual assault occurs in the US. The number of rapes that occur on college campuses is outrageous. According to the National Institute of Justice and the Center for Disease Control for every 1,000 women on a college campus 35 are raped.
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“As we were thinking about big problems in our society, the topic of drug-facilitated sexual assault came up,” Ankesh Madan, one of four male Undercover Colors founders. Ankesh goes on to explain that “All of us have been close to someone who has been through the terrible experience, and we began to focus on finding a way to help prevent the crime. We wanted to focus on preventive solutions, especially those that could be integrated into products that women already use.”
Undercover Colors seeks to help women protect themselves. They consider themselves to be “the first fashion company empowering women to prevent sexual assault.” Ankesh explains, “through this nail polish and similar technologies, we hope to make potential perpetrators afraid to spike a woman’s drink because there’s now a risk that they can get caught. In effect, we want to shift the fear from the victims to the perpetrators.”
As many activists have already pointed out, nail polish is only “dipping a finger” in the larger pool of causes of sexual assault. There is evidence that date rape drugs are not primarily used in sexual assault. A 2007 study from the National Institute of Justice found that only 2.4 percent of undergrad women who’d been sexually assaulted believed they were slipped a drug.
READ: Sexual Assault Myths BUSTED…With Social Media
Rebecca Nagle, co-founder of the group FORCE in Baltimore shared her concerns in a recent Chicago Tribune article. “We need to have conversations about how sexual assault really happens, and we have to be talking about it accurately, because basing our fears on assumptions actually doesn’t get us very far.”
The nail polish is still in the research and development stages, but has a strong chance of reaching the market.
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