Any charged object in a gauge Higgs theory is surrounded by gauge and Higgs fields, as required by physical state conditions. I will argue that these surrounding fields can have a spectrum of excitations, which would appear as a mass spectrum of the charged object, and show numerical evidence of this effect in SU(3) gauge Higgs theory, and in the Landau-Ginzburg model. I will also discuss the gauge-invariant distinction between Higgs and confinement phases in terms of both symmetry and confinement type, a distinction which exists even in the absence of a thermodynamic transition line isolating the two phases.