[groverdot]

Hi,

I'm doing a project for class on bleach and plan on using a demo. What better than the magical properties of colour change?

Anyway, I mixed bleach with red, blue and greed food colouring (mixed with water of course) and received varied results. The red water turned clear (as I expected), the blue dye stayed blue and the green dye stayed green. Can somebody explain why they're not all turning clear?? All of the dyes have the same ingredients. My bleach uses sodium hypochlorite as the oxidizer.

In addition, any other suggestions for "exciting" demos of the redox reaction of bleach are very welcome

Thanks

[Arkcon]

To try to correlate the different observations, you'll have to understand the chemical structures.  You can start by looking them up, from the box label and then online.  This is likely going to be some tough chemistry, however.  Some other things to try: Did you use the same amount of dye?  I don't mean drops of food coloring, they may be formulated with different amounts of dyes for each color.  Also, did you leave them for a long period of time?  Some dyes might be slower to react.