Australia's Science Forum

what's the best lolly to use to extract the dye and use for chromatography? Smarties don't seem to have many colour's that split anymore. Only the brown one.

I buy a large bag of smarties and sort all the brown ones out for the prac. You can also use felt tip pens or permanent markers

I found some black food colouring which splits into 3 colours very quickly. It was very dark so I diluted it with a bit of water.

I Believe M&M's work well.

M&M's much better than smarties

The best pens to use are artline.4mm .. Just saying after testing over 20 different pens and markers ..

Prima wrote:I found some black food colouring which splits into 3 colours very quickly. It was very dark so I diluted it with a bit of water.

HOw do you do it with the food colouring ... intrigued ...

We too make our chromatography ink, mixing red, yellow, green, blue food colouring to make black. We use filter paper, cut a strip from the centre of the circle to hang down into a beaker of water. Put a drop of ink on the centre of the circle, the water travels up the filter paper to the ink and breaks up the colours. Does that make sense? Not great at descriptions