Colorful, vibrant, fake, and sometimes purple Saffron under the microscope
I needed dye for a project; when I asked my mother if we had food coloring at home, she handed me a small box and said it was saffron (zafran, in Bangla). Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world, but thankfully, you can find cheap fakes of anything in Bangladesh. Inside the box was a powder, bright red-orange, odorless, and meant to be used as a food coloring. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a suitable dye for my project, and I’m sure it’s not real Saffron either. However, it, surprisingly, performed great under a microscope. Super vibrant and full of surprises.
(To keep closer to the truth, I will call it food coloring from now on.)
Today, I have for you a bit of food coloring in several forms.
All images have a total magnification of 40x (10x eyepiece, 4x objective lens).
Mixed some of the powder into water and let it out to dry. Formed these wonderful, sharp crystals. Like brittle, glass sunflowers.Look at those yellow petals. Watch them burst out of the bits of black, spreading and fusing, glasslike and chaotic.
A bit of the powder on a slide and added a drop of water. I let the color diffuse on its own and did not mix it thoroughly.
The yellow is so bright it hurts your eyes. Look at the texture, at how it is spread into the liquid medium. Look at the dark, orange powder, look at how it colors the water. The various shapes of the grain, the large circle on the top corner. Everything is slowly diffusing outwards, can you feel that in this picture?A steak of the powder in the colored water. Look at the gradient, the interplay of the colors, the individual grains, and the shapes they form.
I formed the first crystals by slow evaporation. I later attempted to replicate them by placing a drop of solution on a slide and quickly drying it over a spirit flame. To my surprise, the color decomposed to a mauve purple near the very end of the drying process. That sounds like a failure, but everything happens for the best. Just look at how magnificent the result was.
Hues of purple propagating like waves. Look at the dark patches, the tiny black spots speckled throughout the purple, the deep-blue, the range of the colors, the dark crests and light troughs, the complexity.Look at the forms it takes. The shapes, the waves, the dips, the curves, the colors, the shades, the inconsistencies, the flaws, the beauty in it all.The very edge of the slide. The heat of the flame pushed all the liquid to the edges, spreading it thin.Look at the purple dots sprinkled into the picture; the dark, encrusted edge; the whiteness beyond.So much going on here. It looks like a scab badly healed over. It looks like a flavor of ice cream don’t like. It looks malignant, but also elegant.A lone wave propagating outwards. Stopped here, it will never move again. Look at the suppurations of the purple, the thinness of it, how it doesn’t exceed the invisible borders.Look at the middle, at the white. Look at how it is splattered and split, as if the purple bit had erupted forwards. Maybe I brought this part too close to the fire, maybe the surface tension broke and it shrunk. Either way, the dark purple is gorgeous.
All images were viewed with a compound, light microscope at 40x total magnification. Images were taken with a midrange phone camera and cropped. In some cases, filters were used to make the color pop.
