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Candy Chromatography: What makes those colors? The point of doing this project is to use paper chromatography to see which dyes are used in the coatings of your favorite colored candies. Chromatography is a technique for separating mixtures. Chromatography can be used to separate specific components from a complex mixture, based on molecular size or other chemical properties. It can also be used to identify chemicals, for example crime scene samples like blood, drugs, or explosive residue.
Highly accurate chromatographic methods are used for process monitoring, for example to assure that a pharmaceutical manufacturing process is producing the desired drug compound in pure form. With colored mixtures in paper chromatography, you can see the components separate out on the paper. A mixture of various components enters a chromatography process, and the different components are flushed through the system at different rates. Chromatography may be preparative or analytical. The purpose of preparative chromatography is to separate the components of a mixture for further use.
Analytical chromatography is done normally with smaller amounts of material and is for measuring the relative proportions of analytes in a mixture. I think in order to make the candie different colors that they put drops of many different colors into the product to make one definite color. This is my hypothesis because in order to do my project I have to find which colors are used to make a candy one color, so that must mean that the candies have more than one color dye in it. I’ve read that in order to perform chromatography, I’m going to separate different mixtures.
This is an important experiment because when people are eating Skittles some probably wonder “How do they make this Skittle red? “. So now I can figure out with color dyes they used to make a specific color for the Skittle. I think someone would want to do this experiment because first of all it’s fun, but you’re learning at the same time. You’ll learn about many different color dyes that were used to make a Skittle a certain color then for example, you can go and make a shirt a specific color that you want because you’ll know the exact different color dyes to use.