Day 1: The Milk and The Dancing Food Coloring

Why does adding soap to a dish with milk and food coloring drops make the color spread?

Here was our experiment:
 Elizabeth Park and I decided to use

• Palmolive Orange (Dish soap)
• Creamer
• Skim Milk 
• Soy Milk
• 2% Milk
• Whole Milk
• Orange Juice
• Pure Corn Oil
• Coffee
• Red Food Coloring

Our Hypothesis: That the reason the food coloring spread out and swirl was because of the attachment of the soap (non-polar) particles to the (polar) fat molecules.

Here is our line up of liquids that we used (most fat content to the least)

Our Results: We got the most reaction from the dish with the highest fat content (the full milk) we thought that the skim milk won't give us that much of a reaction because the cream is removed in skim milk so the fat content should be less but it still reacted. We also found out that creamer although it has no fat it has artificial fat which causes a reaction. The Coffee and the Oil had the least movement. The Pure Corn oil's food coloring didn't budge at all when we added the soap.