Like so many others, I have been in love with Star Wars since I first saw the movies as a child. I also have a lifelong love for costuming. These loves finally came together in the mid 2000's when I first met some members of the 501st Legion at a convention (for those not in the know, the 501st is an international charity costuming club, specializing in the bad guy characters from a galaxy far far away). In 2009 I joined the ranks of the legion as TK-5246.

I am a Stormtrooper; clean, white, endlessly intimidating, or at least I was. Last year, after not trooping for a few months due to real life keeping me too busy, I pulled my armor from it's bin to discovery a trooper's worst nightmare. My helmet was yellow... How am I supposed to strike fear in the hearts of rebels if my bucket is a color that is synonamous with cowardess. After asking my fellow troopers I discovered that it is a fairly common occurrence, I had three options. I could paint my armor white, attempt to wet sand the top layers of plastic off, or convert it to a sand trooper. None of these were appealing. If you paint your armor once, you can plan on repainting it after every few troops, paint does not adhere well to ABS. Sanding is a lot of pain staking work, with no guarantees that I wouldn't ruin my armor. And if I wanted to be a Sand Trooper I would move to Tattoine.

While on the internet looking for ways of dealing with this cruel twist of fate I discovered Retr0bright. It's an open source formula of ingredients available at your local grocery store developed by vintage computer collectors. It supposedly reverses the process of UV discoloration in ABS. I thought surely there would be hundreds of threads about this on the 501st forums but alas, there were none. Some people mentioned it as a possibility, but it seemed most everyone stuck with the tried and true methods I spoke of earlier. After much debate with myself, I decided I had nothing to lose. I got my materials and tried it. The results are like magic, read on to see how I went about it.