Suppose you were trying to invent a bright orange powder that could easily dye clothes and be hard to wash off. Using your knowledge of quantum mechanics you'd design this symmetrical molecule where an electron's wavefunction can vibrate back and forth along a chain of carbons at the frequency of green light. Absorbing green light makes it look orange! And this molecule doesn't dissolve in water.
Yes: you'd invent turmeric!
Or more precisely 'curcurmin', the molecule that gives turmeric its special properties.
The black atoms are carbons, the white are hydrogens and the red are oxygens.
Read on and check out what pure curcurmin looks like.
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Ain't it pretty? People extract curcumin from turmeric to use as a food coloring in curry powders, mustards, butters, cheeses, and prepared foods. It's also used in dietary supplements due to its unproven and dubious health benefits.
It doesn't dissolve well in water, but it does in alcohol. If you dissolve some curcurmin in vodka and shine a black light on it, you'll see it's fluorescent! That is: it absorbs the high-energy ultraviolet photons and emits lower-energy green photons... the same kind of light it usually likes to *absorb.* Due to the principle of reciprocity, if a substance is good at absorbing some frequency of light, it's also good at emitting that frequency.
Let's see that fluorescence! Check out my next post.
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Here's curcumin dissolved in a hydrocarbon called xylene with ultraviolet light shining on it! It's fluorescent. You can also dissolve it in ethanol, e.g. vodka.
Curcurmin also makes a good pH detector: if you mix it with a base it turns red. This video by @compoundchem illustrates it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVtME5o69I
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