10 Dollars Federal Reserve Note; colored

The 2004 series marked the first significant redesign of the $10 note since 1929, introducing background color washes — a deliberate move by the BEP to stay ahead of increasingly capable commercial color copiers and digital scanners. The Federal Reserve had already rolled out the redesigned $20 in 2003 and $50 in 2004; the $10 followed that same defensive logic, not any aesthetic ambition.

The embedded security thread in this series reads "USA TEN" and glows orange under ultraviolet light — a different glow color from every other denomination, a feature that sounds obvious in retrospect but required years of interagency coordination to standardize across the series.