Name: Sean
Country: USA

Message: I am looking for a dye that can be mixed in water and then stored in clear glass bottles and used to demonstrate glass coatings. 

I have a video of what the dye looks like in the bottle. 

I am really stuck and need a solution...any help would be great.

What do you mean, a dye that can coat glass, or just colored water to demonstrate whether a coating on the glass repeals the water?

Assuming the latter, I would choose food coloring. This will be the easiest choice because you won't have to worry about avoiding contact with your hands. Any dye that has not been tested for use as food or cosmetic coloring should be treated as though it is at least slightly toxic, just as a matter of appropriate caution, requiring you to wear gloves at the very least. Food coloring is water soluble and easy to use.

Food coloring can be purchased in several forms. There are sets of four little bottles in the baking aisle at the grocery store. In the springtime, pharmacies, grocery stores, and department stores sell tablets of Easter Egg dye. You can buy liquid or paste food colorings intended for use in cake decorating at a crafts store, or you can even buy unsweetened artificially flavored drink mixes, such as Kool-Aid, and use them for coloring. All of these different types of food coloring contain the same dyes.

For more information on the dyes in food colorings, see my page, "Using Food Coloring as a Textile Dye for Protein Fibers".

Thanks so much for getting back to me...I'm really in a bind. We used to import the powder from Europe but we no longer have access to the product or even the people that provided the powder, so I can't even tell you for sure what it was. Based on what I read on your website, it was most likely a dye because it would stain almost anything it came in contact with, including hands and every type I cloth I saw it touch.

Food coloring did not make the water dark enough to demonstrate the special glass coating. It's called low maintenance/easy clean glass.

As you can see, the dye was dark brown in color and we referred to it as "mud", although it still maintained the consistency of water.

Okay, given the video you sent, it looks like you won't be needing to handle it without gloves, so anything reasonably non-toxic should be good enough.

The food coloring sold in stores is lighter in color because it is dilute. Probably all you really need is a water-soluble dye that is very dark and intense.

The dyes that can be bought in any grocery store or pharmacy, the Rit or Tintex brand all-purpose dyes, are not suitable for your purposes because they are heavily diluted with salt and detergent. The dyes I mostly work with, Procion MX fiber reactive dyes, would be fine, but they are more expensive than you need, since their special properties are of no use in your application. The cheapest dyes to use, per pound of dye, are the direct dyes. You can buy these by mail-order from many different sources.

What I would recommend would be for you to contact a large dye supplier such as Standard Dye; their contact info is included on my Sources for Supplies page. Describe what you need and they should have some good suggestions; if not, ask them for samples of some very dark, dull, water-soluble dyes.

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