People say it's not good to touch the bulbs with bare hands, so how exactly do you handle them?

Do you wear gloves? use paper towels?

 

I have old latex surgical gloves that I use for this purpose. I'll put one on, spray it with Windex and dry it off with a clean cloth first just to be on the safe side. If I don't have these handy, I pick up the bulb with a Kleenex. Should you accidentally touch one, it's not the end of world. Just wipe them clean with a tissue. It's the oils in your fingerprint that does the damage.

 

with any bulbs? i thought that you only couldnt touch headlight bulbs...not wedge bulbs, etc...

 

This is an issue with the higher heat bulbs, such as our HIDs and the bulbs used in home halogen lamps. The oils on your skin create local cool spots when the bulb heats up and stresses the glass envelope, eventually making it go BOOM (usually within a few seconds...actually kinda boring to see it happen on small bulbs). Wipe the bulb down with alcohol to break up the oils and remove other various pieces of crap on the envelope.

 

Thanks for the info guys.

 

Even new bulbs out of the box are not clean in my expericnce. I always clean them with alcohol and handle them with a paper towel.

 

I tried doing this before with some old amber bulbs, but the amber coloring came off as well!

 

Amber bulbs are not high temperature, and as such, there is no need to treat them in this way. As you found out, the dyes don't always take well to solvents of any kind.