I got a fuge, separated some live. I have a vacuum/pressure vessel to decarb in. I pull a vacuum in the vessel then toss it on the hot plate. First batch came out beautiful, slight pale yellow, clear looking when thinned out. Ran the hot plate at 250c for 3 hours, then 280c for 2 hours because it didn’t appear to fully decarb at 250
Ran another batch today. 280c for 4 hours. Now these are hot plate temps, I have a hard time reading the oil temp. It’s inside a ptfe cup so it’s not reaching those temps.
When I opened it, it had sat and cooled for hours, looked gorgeous, almost clear. Dug into it with my dab tool, came back later and it picked up a purple hue. Dug in some more, got even more purple.
Now I don’t know how to proceed, it appears it’s related to oxidation because it’s only where I’ve dug into the oil.
Should I warm it and dump in my live hte? Will it continue to turn purple?
I’ve seen these colors appear in clear dab rigs in the reclaim. I’ve never seen it happen like that.
So, being live, I would assume no CRC was used, so no change of PH due to powders? I assumed the dabbed bho that caused my rig to briefly color change was run with W1 which may have effected the PH.
I’ve got purple thca in mechanically separated isolate a bunch of times but only when it was wet materiel carrying out anthocyanin. The white portion did get a pink hue and eventually yellow over time but I’ve never seen purple appear on its own.
It was a metal tool, correct? Iron catalyzes the oxidation of phenols and also makes colourful complexes with some of them.
Since the purple colour also develops in resin that hasn’t touched metal, I’d again assume that due to the intense coloration it must be a charge transfer complex between the fully oxidized quinone and the parent phenol, analogous to the complex (which is a dark blackish green) between benzoquinone (bright yellow) and hydroquinone (white/colourless).
I thought it was the dabber tool. I was using a skillet tool gold coated dabber, it’s the tool ive used for years. I cleaned it with ethanol before touching the oil. The side walls were used to rub the thc off the dab tool, which is why that oil reacted.
I placed the oil in the microwave to see if heat would dissipate the color, not really. The majority is still very clear. I took a clean toothpick and pulled a sample from the clear middle. Came out looking perfectly clear. Within 20 minutes it’s picked up a purple hue. If it was just a reaction from the dabber then I was just going to remove the effected oil, but with it reacting to the tooth pick as well, I’m not sure what to do
What you see is normal, it is happening on itself at contact with the air and ambient light. Only a very minor portion of the material is affected. The color change appears transitory as well. Like going from clear/grey, rapidly to vivid purple, then more gradually to red, and to eventually stabilizes to a bho like orange, back to square one.
Mix it with something yellow/orange and it wont happen.
Use a heat gun to melt away the oxidized area, pour hte on top, slowly heat and mix. Once you have the impurities of the hte, which are already oxidized, you will be fine. It won’t oxidize anymore and it won’t show in the cart or mixed.
It’s too bad the industry is so afraid of colors. I had someone on this forum think they’d pretty much die cause of that color. I kinda laughed and told him “what you are afraid of is actually oxygen attaching to the molecular structure”.
We definitely need a better understanding of all these molecules that we are fucking with
My money is still on it literally just being anthocyanin. I’ve done mechanical separation on the same material, once cured and a separate run after rehydrating the flower with steam first. Only got purple on the wet material. Even with flower that was barely, if at all purple, if you press it wet you run into purple rosin. Mechanically separating it turns in purple/white slabs.
Anthocyanin is water soluble (presumably why we see this more when people don’t dry out their powders) and the color changes according to ph/air exposure.
Anthocyanin also has health benefits. Being that this is thca and not cbd you’re probably right. It’s still on line with the industries fear of color i feel. So many of these compounds could be used for helping people instead of us trying to get rid of them.
