The exposure of cultural heritage artifacts to light represents one of the fundamental agents of deterioration in the museum setting. Mitigation of light damage to an artifact is typically achieved by limiting the intensity and duration of light exposure. As a consequence, the visitor’s viewing experience may be diminished by dim lighting conditions or lost when an artifact is placed in storage when nearing a pre-determined light dosage.

The housing of light-sensitive artifacts in reduced oxygen microenvironments, however, may serve to reduce the rate of light damage, for which color change is often used as a proxy. While several research groups have explored the effect of oxygen on color change for various materials, widespread use of reduced oxygen environments as a means of limiting light damage has been constrained by a) a limited dataset of anoxic color change results that has been clouded by a small sample subset which exhibit accelerated color change in such conditions, and b) the lack of readily available and affordable technology for establishing reduced oxygen microenvironments.

This study will focus on the expansion of the anoxic color change dataset by employing a micro-fading tester (MFT) to examine light-induced color change of a varied sample set in a reduced oxygen environment. Sample types exposed include organic dyes, gouaches, and natural history materials. In addition to inducing color change with the use of a high-intensity xenon lamp, the MFT is capable of simultaneous and continuous color measurement, allowing for an examination of the kinetics of color change.

The anoxic color change results obtained with the MFT will also be compared to previous results from a similar experiment in which an overlapping sample set was housed in anoxic conditions and exposed to halogen lamps using a traditional lightbox protocol. While acknowledged that the spectral power distribution and light intensities of the xenon and halogen lamps are different, a quantitative and qualitative comparison of results generated by exposure to the relatively experimental MFT and the more conventional lightbox method will advance our understanding of the relationship between the two experimental techniques.