Tips for extreme cheapskates: changing the color of Christmas lights

Basically, today I was feeling really anxious, and since I don't have anything to de-stress with, I decided to put up the Christmas tree. Maybe that would help clear my head… The only problem is that I really wanted my tree to have only gold lights and red decorations. I've wanted this style for a long time, but I've never been able to do it because I always choose the wrong lights. I end up picking too many random colors, and actually, last year I did something stupid: I bought white lights for my tree, along with some multicolored ones, but I NEVER liked the white lights. They looked like hospital bulbs, just awful. So I thought maybe there was a way to change the color? Haha, I thought about using yellow acrylic paint, but before doing anything silly, I checked online, since I'm sure someone had this same idea at some point and probably even made a tutorial

And really, more than a tutorial, I was looking to see if it was safe to do this or if I'd get electrocuted trying. My will to live isn't great, but I also don't want to die by electrocution, haha. To my surprise, I found several videos that did this, but most of them painted each light bulb with nail polish of the desired color. Obviously, I don't have any yellow nail polish since I would never use that color on my nails. So I tried using yellow acrylic paint. I must say this option wasn't the best. Although the color was visible, it was very faint and obviously needed several coats, but getting the paint to dry was very difficult.

But all was not lost, as I had a second option: these acrylic markers I bought exactly a year ago were perfect for this. I did have to apply three coats, but it worked very well. At first, I used a yellow marker, but I realized the color it left was too yellow. I wanted something more "golden," so I did the second coat with a light orange marker, and it looked much better.


Here you can see the difference between one color and the other. On the left, it's being painted with orange, giving that golden color I imagined, while on the right, we see a cold, chick-yellow color.

And by the way, this is what the lights used to look like; the change from a cold white to a warm gold is impressive.

After painting each light bulb, we put up the Christmas tree, added the lights and decorations, and it turned out just as I'd imagined it for so long. I finally achieved my dream, haha. By the way, my plan was actually to buy yellow lights, specifically some I saw that had a star-like effect, but when I asked the price, I changed my mind. They were extremely expensive. Anyway, this activity, besides being free, helped me take my mind off things today, so I'm very happy with my little tree.



