Making an edible dye - Indigo carmine

Have you considered trying to make Maya blue? It a pigment that's know for being extremely durable, and nearly chemically impervious. It's suppose to be made from heating indigo with palygorskite clay. Here's an article on it: <a href="https://www.livescience.com/28381-maya-blue-paint-recipe-discovered.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.livescience.com/28381-maya-blue-paint-recipe-discovered.html</a>

Lol, o dropped the ball on that

Nile Red

You could have made green eggs and ham! GREEN EGGS AND HAAAMM!

Liz and Ash in Florida. It's very hot! Climate change will kill us all.

In principle a good idea, but around the globe, different denaturants are used. As Nile said, his only contains the salt. Mine also has MEK, which forms an azeotrope with water and ethanol. I know that methanol is also used sometimes and Doug's Lab's alcohol contains ethyl acetate. The fact that many azeotropes are formed in various combinations makes it really difficult to purify (which is after all the whole point why these chemicals are used). I purify mine by refluxing it over NaOH for 8 hours, which initiates various ketone condensation reactions, after which you can distill out the ethanol. This method would actually also remove ethyl acetate, so that's a plus.

Colin Ries

Sounds like a good topic for a video! "How to identify, and clean up different denatured ethanols"

Michael Aichlmayr

The origin of the salt you buy also matters. Rock salt and sea salt are both ultimately derived from sea water, however the rock salt usually undergoes purification by recristallyzation whereas sea salt generally doesn't, and so it will have impurities such as organic matter (algae etc) as well as more mineral impurities, primarily magnesium chloride and sulfate. It may matter for some applications.

Silviu T

distillation would get rid of it. I always distill my ethanol first because of this. You should be happy it's only denatonium benzoate, here they add 1% MEK which makes it smell bad and is quite hard to separate....

Colin Ries

That is a good suggestion. I didnt really think of that.

Nile Red

Green eggs and ham would have been much more appropriate. But still gross

Nile Red

That's actually the one reference i found. The issue was that i couldnt use ethanol because all of my 95% ethanol is denatured with denatonium benzoate..

Nile Red

I always thought that I could stomach it. But the color and look was much more important than i thought. Also, that's a good idea for the salt. I dont even remember where i found the stuff i used. I think it was in a chinese food store.

Nile Red

Yup. I do plant to make Nile red though, which if i recall, is via azo

Nile Red

Yeah, that is why i didnt taste the pure dye. There really isnt much safety data on it, as far as i could find.

Nile Red

For un-iodized sodium chloride, look for pickling salt. It doesn't have iodine which can make pickles dark, and as an added benefit, doesn't contain anti-caking agents, that can turn pickling liquid cloudy. It's also usually significantly cheaper because it comes in larger quantities.

Michael Aichlmayr

Blue foods: chewing gum, certain liquors, blueberry pie or icecream. Those blue eggs looked horrible! Maybe green eggs and ham are better?

He has covered azo dyes already. I think it's better that he moves on to different subjects.

Silviu T

I found something on purifying it in the good old "Purification of laboratory chemicals sixth edition" from 2009. I have a PDF on my Google drive: <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2JeqG9MJ6D6YmVqNlhyMmNuZE0/view?usp=drivesdk" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2JeqG9MJ6D6YmVqNlhyMmNuZE0/view?usp=drivesdk</a> Check out page 531.

Colin Ries

FWIW I agree with the NordVPN sponsorship. I use their service, it's very good. As for salt, try to find kosher salt. That one is usually not iodized. Also, food color is a surprisingly large part of what the brain interprets as appetizing vs. gross. There were a number of experiments made in the 1950s/60s I think with regular foods that had their normal color changed vs. how people perceived their taste. For instance, milk that was dyed purple was universally considered as tasting very bad, even though when blindfolded the subjects couldn't tell the difference. And so on.

Silviu T

1-napthol and 2-napthol make interesting dyes too Red Nile!

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

Well Indigo Carmine in large amounts is toxic it can effect blood pressure. It not known about chronic small amounts of it. It considered level 2 health. Well did all those crystilation give you only 0.9 grams of it? Next you could heat Napthlene in 93 percent sulfuric acid to produce a Sulfonic Napthlene chemical to make similar dyes too. I wanted to make 1-napthol and 2-napthol react them with acetin too.

Daniel Blake Shoemaker

18:28 the text at the top needs to be larger - don’t be so shy about your toaster tutorial! It’s world class and the people need to know! :)

The Gayest Person on Patreon

damn, good call!

Nile Red

at 2:28 it's sulfuric acid not hcl