Dish Soap Makes Colors Go Cray Cray Like Fireworks On The Fourth Of July

The first experiment our class conducted in A Block Honors Biology was with milk, food coloring, and dish soap. Lucy Huang and I developed a hypothesis based on the Dancing Milk video. We both noticed that at home, after washing the dishes without gloves on, our hands would feel slimy or burn and become dry. We decided that the cause for the swirling food coloring in the milk after dish soap was added, was because the degreaser in dish soap broke down the fat in milk. The digesting action of the degreaser can be visually seen with the aid of food coloring. 

Procedures for the experiment:

1. Grab two petri dishes. Fill one of them with whole milk, and the other with 2% milk.
2. Put a few drops of food coloring in each dish. 
3. Take two toothpicks and dab them in the same kind of dish soap. 
4. Take each tooth pick and poke the center of the milk filled petri dish with the end that is coated  in dish soap.
5. Watch the colors dance.

We repeated the experiment three times to be sure that our results were consistent each time. Lucy and I concluded that our hypothesis was correct. The food coloring in the 2% milk mixed faster and more thoroughly than the food coloring in the whole milk. 2% milk contains less fat than whole milk, therefore, dish soap would be able to break down the fat in the 2% milk faster, causing the food coloring to mix faster. Also, since the 2% milk is less dense than whole milk due to less concentration of fat, the surface tension in the 2% milk allows the food coloring to flow more freely. 

In the following three pictures, whole milk is the dish on the left and 2% milk is the dish on the right.

First 

Second

Third

results :)

Lights. Camera. Action.