home improvement

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Liquid Lamps

For beautiful mood lighting, just combine off-the-shelf parts -- and add mineral oil

When you're a performance artist, creating the right ambience in your show is everything. It all starts with lighting. So two years ago, my partner and I decided to build a lamp that would capture the aquatic theme of a show that our company, Radiohole, was putting on. We wanted to make a lightbulb look like it was submerged in water, so we used mineral oil, a liquid that's clear and nonconductive (we spilled a lot of oil before finally hitting on a fixture that was both portable and leakproof).

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