Color Experiment

         In science class, we conducted a lab to figure out whether or not food coloring from skittles was polar or non-polar, and whether or not food coloring has more than one color in it at a time.  The way we did this was we dropped some water on different colored skittles to get the color out.  Then, we dabbed the color onto coffee filter paper.  After that, we put the paper in water.  Water traveled up the paper, and the idea was to see if the colors would travel up, too.  Since water is polar, and polar substances wash polar substances, if the colors rose, then they would be polar.  The coffee filter paper is non-polar, and since non-polar sticks to non-polar, we knew that if the color stayed, it was non-polar.  Also, if there were many different colors in one dye, they should have risen so that there was one color on top of another.  As you can see in the picture above, the experiment was done properly, and you can see that there are multiple colors.  The colors that rise the most, will be the most polar, as they will have traveled the furthest with the water.  The colors at the bottom near their dots are not as polar, because they have not followed the water up so far. 
As you can see in the picture to the left, we started out by putting the color on the dots.  However, we could not get enough dye to go on, or it was too diluted by water, so the colors are not very clear. 

In the photo to the right, you can see that the water traveled up the paper, but there is not very much color visible that has traveled up from the dots.  We did this experiment wrong, because we didn't put enough color on the paper, so it kind of failed.  We can't see anything going up the paper.  If we were to try this lab again, we should add more skittle dye to the paper, and we might want to use white paper instead of brown so that the color would show more.