Taste the Rainbow....

March 18, 2024 10:36 PM

A long time ago, I saw an amazing rainbow vitamin product packaging which I never saw again. Help me rediscover it?

When I was a little boy, my mother - who was a doctor - had access to the latest medical innovations. Vitamin supplements were a new thing and relatively uncommon (this was in France in the late 1960s), and they typically looked medicinal and tasted foul. I suppose it was lucky they came as syrups (the French loves them some suppositories!)

One day, she comes home, really excited, with this special bottle of syrup. The first spoonful comes out yellow, but turns blue in the spoon, seemingly in contact with the air, and tastes like apricot. I guess the manufacturer wanted to create a Mary-Poppins-with-the-magical-elixir effect?

Anyway, I've never seen such a product again. Did I hallucinate it? Is this a false memory implanted on the flying saucer during my abduction?

If anyone has come across a product that changes color in contact with the air, I'd like to know.

And - chemically - how would it work? Can oxidation-induced color change happen in seconds? And how would you prevent the rest of the product in the bottle to stay yellow?

posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... to Health & Fitness (2 answers total)

I don't have any answers for you but your question brought up a couple of memories from my own childhood in France in the 1950s. The first was a seemingly magical glass pitcher into which different colored fruit juices were poured and remained discretely layered, like one layer of apricot, one layer of cherry, one layer of pineapple. It was at someone's house and I only saw it that one time. In retrospect I'm pretty sure it was just a multicolored glass pitcher that produced the effect. The other was an illustrated card a teacher gave me that changed colors depending on the weather. It showed a small child holding an umbrella and the umbrella did change color depending on humidity in the air. I'm pretty sure there is some substance that will do that. Another thing I remember is that a lot of medicines came in single-dose ampoules and the end had to be cut or broken . So maybe that's what your vitamin was in, and not in a bottle, and it did change color with exposure to air.
posted by mareli at 3:12 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, mareli, what wonderful memories! I remember the glass ampoules, also. They came with a little file you were supposed to use on the "neck". I used to love doing the filing and the snapping of the glass top for my grandparent's medicine.....
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 8:36 AM on March 19