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Retro gamers, gather round. This is a public service announcement from someone who has definitely Googled "why did my PlayStation 1 turn the color of old oatmeal" at 2 in the morning. If your beloved childhood console has gone a little yellow, a little beige, a little smoker's lounge chic, I need you to hear this with love. Do not. Retrobright. It.
Tech Tangents, a retro tech YouTuber and accidental time traveling scientist, just revealed the results of a ten year long unplanned experiment. Back in 2015, he retrobrighted a Sega Dreamcast using the classic hydrogen peroxide and sunlight method. It worked at first. The yellow faded. Everyone clapped. But then he left the console disassembled on a shelf for a decade and only came back to it now. And the results are rough.
The untreated parts aged naturally and honestly looked better. The treated parts? Blotchy. Streaky. More yellow than before. Basically the plastic equivalent of over bleaching your hair and pretending it looks fine. The problem is that retrobrighting doesn't actually fix anything long term. The yellowing comes from fire retardant chemicals oxidizing inside the plastic. You are not reversing age. You are just blasting it with chemicals and UV until it behaves for a minute.
He tried everything. The sous vide hydrogen peroxide bath. Ozone. UV lamps. Various mad scientist combos. None fully restored the plastic, and some made it worse. The conclusion was clear. Retrobrighting does more harm than good and may speed up the aging process.
So if your console is yellowing. Let it. Embrace it. It earned that patina from decades of pure gaming joy. Your Dreamcast is not supposed to look fresh out of the box in 2025. It is supposed to look like it survived LAN parties, soda spills, and the Dreamcast launch.
Watch the video below: