Human society has undergone many significant changes in just the past 200 years. The Industrial Revolution, and discovering how to harness electromagnetic energy to benefit our lives, has ushered the presence of artificial electromagnetic energy into our daily lives. With the launch of 2G wireless technology in 1990, this energy was on its way to surrounding us 24/7. Now, in just 30 years since we began to experiment with the conveniences of wireless devices, the prevalence of EMF emitting technology has accelerated to exponential levels we can’t even comprehend. We are now in the age of 5G, which to function optimally needs receiving and transmitting antennas (repeaters) on almost every street corner!
Along with the drastic increase in EMFs due to humanity’s enthusiastic acceptance of this new way of life, has also come widespread questioning and skepticism regarding its safety when it comes to our health. More and more people are seeking protection from this thick blanket of frequencies that we are exposed to mostly without our consent – a respite from the constant stimulus. Even if you can’t tangibly “feel” the frequencies, many people have an intuitive sense that they need to get away from them – urgently if you’re a very sensitive person, or if you’re not consciously aware of them, you may just feel the occasional need to leave “the hustle and bustle of daily life”.
We want to get away from them, to place a barrier between these unwanted, uninvited, invisible intruders. They have entered our homes, which we consider to be our personal safe spaces to rest, recover and feel protected from the dangers of the world. Unfortunately, while the protective barriers of our cozy homes can keep out inclement weather, hostile physical intruders, and air and noise pollution, they cannot keep out the electromagnetic energy that saturates the area we live. These EMFs can come from electricity in our own home and RF radiation from our own wireless devices, but a large amount also comes from outside our home – nearby cell towers, smart electric meters, the neighbor’s Wifi or satellite internet, and even passing cars that are using data from phone calls and GPS navigation.
The idea of blocking, or shielding, EMFs is an obvious first thought. It seems like a simple and straightforward answer, and satisfies our mental need to put a barrier between ourselves and the energy we want to get away from.
In the EMF protection industry, the terms Faraday cages and shields, EMF and RF shields, and protective fabrics and materials have become well known.
How effective are these products for actually protecting our health from the effects of manmade EMF sources?
Is it the simple and straightforward solution that it seems to be, or are there complexities and nuances that we need to consider to ensure we have proper protection?
What is a Faraday cage, anyway?
So who is Faraday, and why is his cage such an important invention? We will have to go back to a time when no one was thinking about EMF protection, and the first experiments with electricity were being done by some very curious geniuses!
In the 1800s, English scientist Michael Faraday made some revolutionary discoveries about electricity. He is often called the “Father of Electricity” because he discovered that a changing magnetic field produces an electric field. Rather than observing or producing just electric energy, or just magnetic energy, this new understanding enabled us to intentionally produce electric and magnetic fields together, which is considerably more functional and dynamic. EMFs are called electromagnetic fields because there’s always an electric field and a magnetic field existing together, each perpetuating the other.
A conductor that’s placed inside a changing magnetic field (or moving through a stationary one) produces voltage across the conductor, which is called electromagnetic induction. This is also called Faraday’s Law in modern physics, since the phenomenon was first observed and described by Michael Faraday.
Faraday also discovered that an electric current aimed at a conductive metal container would distribute its charge across the entire surface of the box, without passing through the container into the inside. Therefore, the inside of the box was basically a “dead zone” with no measurable fields. Faraday reproduced an earlier experiment by Benjamin Franklin that was based on the same principles, but Faraday took it much further with several variations, all showing the same results, and actually explained the mechanism. He built a room coated with metal foil, and standing inside of it himself, allowed high-voltage discharges from an electrostatic generator to strike the outside of the room. He used an electroscope to show that there was no electric charge present on the inside of the room's walls.
Modern Faraday cages come in many forms, and are used for many purposes. They can be made from sheets of solid metal, or mesh, cage or grid-like patterns full of small or large holes. They can be made from many types of metal, as long as the metal is marginally to highly conductive. Common shielding materials include copper, silver, gold, aluminum, steel, and brass. Although steel is far less conductive than electron-rich precious metals like silver and copper, its practicality and low cost makes it a good choice for many kinds of Faraday cages.
Modern examples of Faraday cages
You may not realize it, but you are likely utilizing and interacting with Faraday cages every day! Cars and airplanes act as Faraday cages, due to the metal frames and exterior paneling inherent to their design. This is why you can be driving your car in a lighting storm, and are still safe from being struck by lightning – if it did happen to strike your car, the high voltage current would distribute its charge across the entire outside surface of the metal panels, then pass into the ground below, while everything inside the car is completely unaffected.
It’s the same situation when you’re flying in an airplane. Did you know that lighting strikes airplanes all the time? Even if you fly a lot, you may not know this, because you are completely protected when you’re inside the plane, and likely wouldn’t even notice if your plane was struck! The outer “skin” of an airplane is primarily made of aluminum, which is highly conductive.
Microwave ovens are also Faraday cages, although they work in reverse by containing their electromagnetic energy inside the oven, so it won’t leak out and dissipate. Of course, we recommend never using microwave ovens to cook food, but if you have a microwave hanging around, you could always use it to store your sensitive electronics inside the unplugged device, to protect them from being harmed by natural or artificial electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that can fry your technology!
There are also many uses for entire rooms that are Faraday cages: MRI rooms in hospitals are completely shielded to ensure that the high powered magnetic and radiofrequency diagnostic imaging won’t be contaminated with stray electromagnetic radiation from other sources. Militaries and governments use shielded bunkers and vehicles to safeguard critical systems from solar storms and manmade EMP attacks, and to protect sensitive communications from electronic eavesdropping. Science labs that perform rigorous clinical studies use fully shielded rooms to create a neutral testing environment, free of outside electromagnetic influences.
Power utility lineman who work with high voltage electricity and live wires wear special conductive (shielded) suits woven with ultra fine silver fibers, protecting them from potentially deadly electric shocks.
What are the limitations of Faraday cages and shielding?
When it comes to EMF protection applications, shielding and Faraday cages can offer some protection, under the right circumstances. However, there are some limitations that need to be considered, so you can use shielding methods appropriately, without deriving a false sense of security by believing you’re more fully protected than you are.
Faraday cages and shielding materials can only block or attenuate (reduce) some kinds of frequencies, and their effectiveness will also depend on the size of the holes in the material, and how much coverage the material gives to what you’re trying to protect.
The holes in the shielding materials have to be significantly smaller than the wavelength size of the frequencies they are designed to block, so higher frequencies (with shorter wavelengths) in the microwave and radiofrequency spectrum require extremely small holes, or a continuous material with no holes, to be blocked effectively. A traditional Faraday “cage”, or a mesh or a grid, may block the extremely low frequency (ELF) fields from your home electricity, but a cell phone signal will pass through it easily.
A full Faraday cage that completely surrounds a person or device, and which is made of solid, thick conductive metal, will offer fairly complete protection from measurable electromagnetic fields. It will keep all external electromagnetic fields on the outside, and all internal ones on the inside of the cage. If you invest in expensive shielding paint for your bedroom, and use several layers to ensure that the metal particulate in the paint is distributed as thoroughly as possible, and your room has no windows, then your cell phone or Wifi router should not work at all from within the room. If it does, you aren’t getting complete protection.
If you put a full Faraday cage over the top of your Wifi router or smart electric meter, those devices should no longer work at all, since they rely on wireless signal transmission to do their job. Likewise, if you store your cell phone in a shielded case, you should not be able to receive a call on your phone. It should render your wireless communication devices completely unusable. This is not practical or desirable, unless you just want to store your phone in a shielded case to protect it from an EMP (or for cybersecurity and privacy purposes) when you’re not using it.
To remain practical, most shielding products are not full Faraday cages. They are usually designed to block the frequencies on just one side of the device, which is often the side that touches your body, like with shielded phone cases. The actual protection you get from this kind of product is fairly low, and you would be better off keeping your phone further away from your body, or turning it on airplane mode (or off completely) if you have to carry it in your pocket. Likewise, Wifi and smart meter shields are made of metal mesh with tiny holes, so that most of the RF radiation is blocked, but there's still enough getting through so the devices can emit the RF fields needed to remain functional.
Clothing made from shielded materials, like woven silver fibers, offers somewhat more protection, as it will protect the body parts it covers from all ambient EMFs, not just your phone like a shielded phone case does. However, since your entire body is conductive, the ambient EMFs will still reach unprotected body parts and enter your body through your skin (since your pores act as antennas), traveling through your electromagnetically active nervous system. Our bodies are not just a bunch of separate parts, but are an integrated whole, so anything that affects one part of our body will ultimately affect our whole body. This is one reason you wouldn’t want to rely on shielded clothing as your primary form of EMF protection, but only as an adjunct to more complete forms of protection, like Blushield home and portable devices.
Another consideration with complete Faraday cages is that in addition to blocking the unwanted EMFs, they will also block a portion of the beneficial natural EMFs from the Earth and cosmos, including the Schumann resonances. These frequencies are considered essential to the health and natural rhythms of life on Earth, and we do not want to block them. Shielding materials won’t block the Earth’s magnetic field (since they cannot block static magnetic fields), but there is an entire symphony of natural beneficial frequencies that you won’t be able to benefit from if you’re inside a Faraday cage.
Shielding materials do not block scalar fields
There is one final consideration when it comes to the limitations of shielding, and is the most important one, in our opinion. Every measurable electromagnetic field that exists has both a transverse component and a scalar component. The transverse component of the EMF is the part that you can measure with an EMF meter. It is the part that exists materially in 3D space, and can be blocked by Faraday cages and shielding materials.
However, as we have discussed at length in previous articles, every EMF also has a scalar component, which could be described as the “essence” of the field, or the pure energy and potential behind the material manifestation of moving physical electrons. This pure energy moves through the space between atoms, so cannot be blocked by physical shielding materials. The scalar component of an EMF can also be considered to be an information field, containing the blueprint of whatever information the field is carrying or transmitting. Scalar fields are highly bioactive, affecting the body considerably more than the transverse, measurable, “block-able” portion of the field!
Scalar fields can be produced intentionally, or unintentionally as a byproduct of a transverse field. Manmade EMFs from wireless devices use a transverse carrier signal to transmit information, and the scalar component of this field is unintentionally transmitted as well, carrying biologically incoherent information that our bodies pick up on and react to. When we use shielding to block external EMFs, the scalar component of that EMF will still get through, and will still affect us.
While all measurable (transverse) fields have a scalar component, that is not the case with scalar fields. There can be “pure scalar” fields, which are pure informational/blueprint fields that aren’t bound by the same rules of space and time that physically manifest frequencies are subject to.
Blushield technology uses pure scalar as the carrier signal for its multiple waveform algorithms based on natural frequencies and patterns. This allows our bodies to perceive and entrain with these beneficial fields much more easily (since scalar is more bioactive), and the field is not limited by the properties of transverse fields, which lose power over distance and are easily blocked or attenuated by physical obstructions.
If you placed your Blushield inside of a full Faraday cage, it would still work just as well! Your body will still perceive the field. This would also be the case if you were inside a shielded room, and your Blushield was plugged in somewhere outside the room. Your body would still pick up on the field, even though the transverse carrier signals used by cell phones and Wifi would no longer get through.
Frequencies are everywhere, all the time
The truth is that we are in constant community with many types of frequencies, at all times, and we will be for our entire lives. Instead of trying to block out the frequencies around us, a more effective solution is to introduce an additional frequency field into our environment that is biologically coherent, which our bodies can then preferentially seek out and choose to resonate with.
The majority of us do not want to completely cut ourselves off from the outside world and try to live in a bubble, but would prefer to develop a healthy relationship with the world around us. Along with living comes exposure to many frequencies, including a variety of beneficial and harmful ones, and we just need the tools to maximize our resilience and vitality, so we can handle anything that comes our way in life with more ease.
For more information on this subject, please read our other articles on scalar energy, and the benefits and limitations of different types of EMF protection methods and devices:
Passive vs. Active EMF Protection
Scalar Energy & EMF – What You Need To Know
Scalar Energy, Biology & Consciousness