Elephant Toothpaste: Pop Goes the Germs!

There is nothing more fun to watch than experimenting with elephant toothpaste, which in chemical terms is known as, hydrogen peroxide experiment. Its fun quotient is also evident through its popularity. The simple technique to make the experiment work is to mix hydrogen peroxide with soap and then add some kind of catalyst so that the hydrogen peroxide breaks down quickly. The concept and mechanism behind elephant toothpaste is that hydrogen peroxide breaks into water and oxygen, lots of it actually! This mixes with the soap and thus moves the soap particles causing the foam.

In many cases of trying to make the perfect elephant toothpaste food coloring is also added to the mix to give it that toothpaste like color. The fun part is that while in the process of decomposition, the oxygen tries its level best to escape from the container and the peroxide breaking down also makes the soap mix with the water, thus the much awaited foam. Now adding both the foam and the food color, voila! We have successful elephant toothpaste! Although hydrogen peroxide is quite stable, there are many different ways of breaking it down rapidly. Since it contains a lot of oxygen, once broken down by using a catalyst, which in most cases is a metal, the oxygen rapidly escapes or tries to escape in case of a contained atmosphere, and since it has soap mixed with it, foam is formed as a result. If it has food coloring involved then, for obvious reasons, it will look more or less like toothpaste. Actually the thing will look like elephant toothpaste due to the fact that there is so much frothy foam involved. Now comes the part where you can tweak you experiment with elephant toothpaste.

First and foremost, the mouth or opening of the bottle in which the experimentation is being done will affect the flow of the bubbles. The narrower the opening, the more the bubbles will fly out through it, the fatter the opening of the mouth of the bottle, the lesser flow of bubbles through it. Secondly, the concentration of hydrogen peroxide makes or breaks the experimentation. The usual kind of hydrogen peroxide you get in the drug store is hardly 3% hydrogen peroxide, thus don’t even think of trying to create your very own elephant toothpaste with it, if you are not with children. If children are involved then you can carry out this experiment using the widely available 3% hydrogen peroxide and use active yeast as the catalyst. You need to get your hands on something which is at least 30-35% hydrogen peroxide. Then there is the catalyst, which is another very important aspect of the whole experiment, without which the experiment is good for nothing. The more powerful the catalyst, the faster the peroxide will break down and the more oxygen will be released. Finally, what is the lesson learnt through all this? Well, lots of fun things like there’s a lot of oxygen in hydrogen peroxide!