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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This page leads to more questions than it answers.

After reading it, I still have no idea what the difference is between a dye and a lake, or why it matters, but now I realize I also don't know what blooming is, whether it matters if a dye is water- or oil-soluble, what tinting by dispersion is (and why it matters if that's different from a dye), or why I should care about "dye load". Since those all seem to be involved in the answer to the main question.

Maybe there's a better page to submit to HN on this topic, because this one seems awfully confusing.

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> whether it matters if a dye is water- or oil-soluble

"Dyes are water soluble, and will not mix with oils."

> what the difference is between a dye and a lake

"Lakes are produced by coloring an aluminum salt... substrate using FD&C dyes."

So a dye is soluble material; lakes are an insoluble material colored with dyes.

> tinting by dispersion is

Lakes disperse in the liquid; dyes dissolve into it. Presumably if you're interested in actually using dyes, this is a distinction you're already familiar with.

> why I should care about "dye load"

"Remember: in general, the higher the dye load, the less you'll need to achieve the color you're going for. Don't make the mistake of comparing a 70% dye load product to one with a 90% dye load."

Are you reading the same article? Literally all the questions you ask are answered, clearly, in the article, with perhaps an exception to some of the "why it matters" questions. If you see the "about" page for this company you can see that their colorants are for things like bath bombs, soaps, makeup, etc., and so you'd want different things depending on what you're trying to color (e.g. if you're coloring an oil/fat vs. water in a bath).

Literally the second sentence is:

> Dyes must be "bloomed" before use.

It does not define blooming. I still have no idea what that means.

Maybe if you're an expert in this stuff already then it all makes sense. But I'm already lost when it starts by talking about blooming -- and then once it gets to aluminum salts, and strongly emphasizing that it's not elemental aluminum (which matters to the reader why...?), I realize that this is not written for the layperson.

The paragraph is this:

> Dyes must be "bloomed" before use. In their unbloomed state (i.e. in the jar) they are different color than in use. For example, our Bright Green Dye is brown in the jar, then turns a vibrant bright green when bloomed in water.

It does a pretty good job, together with the rest of the article, explaining that blooming means letting it dissolve in water, at which point the color changes.

I'm not familiar with dyeing at all, but "blooming" is used in a bunch of other contexts that mean similar things, e.g. "coffee blooming" (adding water to freshly ground coffee), even things like "algae blooms".

After reading multiple comments here, I decided to look it up, and discovered:

> Blooming is the process of adding your bath bomb dye to hot water and mixing it with sodium bicarbonate

So no, it's not just dissolving it in water. It's dissolving it in hot water and adding an additional totally separate chemical.

So no, the article does not do a "pretty good job" at explaining. It doesn't explain any of that.

OK, you're right, I apologize and take back what I said. Wouldn't have assumed at all from that description that blooming means adding a base.

One of their dyes is yellow as a powder, but it reacts with lye water when making soap so that it turns a bright orange. Once the saponifying process is completed, the orange comes back to the expected yellow. Very unnerving process when you failed to read that part of the product listing. I also happened to use it for the first time with a fragrance that super accelerated, so it was a double whammy of a disappointing feeling. So at least the fact it turned back to yellow made the batch less disappointing.

Context clues tell me "blooming" probably means "putting it in water and letting it dissolve", but that's just my guess. It would be nice if they defined it.

The article doesn't make this very clear and the way it phrases it is confusing.

> Dyes must be "bloomed" before use. In their unbloomed state (i.e. in the jar) they are different color than in use.

With the evident meaning: "bloomed" -> out of the jar, in the water.

But blooming means precipitating the dye in whatever solution it will be in, usually using a salt like sodium bicarbonate.

[EDIT] The Wiki page on lakes makes it clearer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_pigment

>for this company you can see that their colorants are for things like bath bombs, soaps, makeup, etc.

I can highly recommend Mad Micas. It's one of my favorite vendors in this space. Super friendly with hand written thank yous for every purchase.

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