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Exploding Colours
 Is it science or magic? Make droplets of colour “explode” by adding a secret ingredient and find out for yourself.
What You Need
• Pie plate
• Cream or whole milk
• Food colouring
• Liquid dishwashing detergent
What to Do
1. Fill the pie plate half-full with cream.
2. Gently squeeze drops of food colouring onto the cream. Make sure the drops don’t touch one another.
3. Pour drops of the detergent onto the cream around the edges of the pie plate. (This is where you say, Abracadabra!)
4. Show your magic trick to your friends! (To make it more of a trick, you could first put some of the detergent into a plastic squeeze bottle — like an empty water bottle — so your audience doesn’t know what “mystery ingredient” you are adding.)
How it Works
Cream contains tiny droplets of fat. (In this experiment, you need to use cream or whole milk because it has more fat than skim or 2% milk.) These molecules of fat stick together. When you add the food colouring, the drops float on top of the film of fat droplets. Soap breaks the bonds holding the fat molecules together. This creates gaps between the fat droplets and the colour swirls into those spaces.
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