Milk Lab 🥛

Milk, food coloring, and soap interact with each other in a way that I would not have expected.  For the Milk lab, we started by putting cold 2% milk into a petri dish and three dots of food coloring in the milk. Once the three dots of blue, green, and red food coloring were dropped into the dish of milk, we placed a drop of soap directly in the middle. As soon as the soap hit the milk, the colors were dispersed. After a few minutes of observation, it was clear that colors were being dispersed through the soap. Why did these ingredients act this way?

My partner and I tried a few different things with this experiment in an effort to identify the reason behind this reaction. We first tried vitamin D milk which had no apparent difference. We then tried placing the food coloring and soap at a farther distance from each other. This did the same thing as when the colors were in a triangle formation. The third thing that we tried was mixing the food coloring together and putting the soap directly on top of those food colors. This only made the colors come out muddled rather than separately. The final two things we tried involved placing the food coloring and soap in water. We noticed that there was little to no interaction between the soap, food coloring, and the water. The only thing that happened was that the soap slightly pulled the food coloring towards it. 

The conclusion that we drew from these experiments was that the soap was reacting to the fat content or chemicals in the milk. The food colors were more than likely a way to make this reaction more evident.We are not completely sure why this reaction took place yet, but through our observations, we are able to rule out some of the theories we originally had wondered about.