Where this was said
The Girls Who Glowed: Celebrity, Symptoms, and Silence
At 37:05 · chapter starts 33:30
Within a few years of opening, the radium girls of New Jersey had become local celebrities. Unlike typical factory workers, they were young, fashionable, and visibly special: they literally glowed in the dark as they walked home from work, their hair, face, and clothes shimmering with radium dust [1] — Alaina Urquhart "When I would go home at night, my clothing would shine in the dark. You could see where I was, my hair, my face. The girls shone like the w…" 34:29 . Some deliberately wore their dance dresses to work on Fridays to capture the glow for evenings out. Grace Fryer recalled that even her nasal discharge glowed on her handkerchief. Katherine Schaub, hired at 14, began getting severe acne within a year; blood tests revealed unusual changes that a doctor associated with high phosphorus exposure. But the company's Dr. George Willis reassured the girls repeatedly that their symptoms had nothing to do with their jobs. The reassurances were so effective that the painters laughed off the strange occurrences — including painting their own faces, nails, and teeth with radium paint for fun.
When the dial painters walked home after their shifts, they glowed in the dark — hair, clothes, and skin coated in luminescent radium dust. Some deliberately wore their dance dresses to work on Fridays so they would glow on the dance floor later. They were celebrated as glamorous local celebrities; no one knew they were walking around irradiated.
Dial painters began showing up at dentists with tooth pain, loose teeth, and extraction sockets that wouldn't heal. In extreme cases, dentists discovered jaw bone that simply crumbled to dust when touched — the result of radium replacing calcium in bone. They called this 'radium jaw,' and there was nothing medicine could do to stop it.
