Making Violuric Acid: One of The Most Colorful Chemicals on Earth

A few months ago, one of my sponsors sent me a sample of barbituric acid. I didn’t know what to do with it at first, but after doing some research, I learned that it could be used to make violuric acid: a chemical notorious for its extremely colorful compounds. So in today’s video, I’ll be making a small amount of this acid to see just how colorful its salts truly are.
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0:00 Intro
0:30 A brief warning
0:45 Making sodium violurate
2:03 Converting the violurate to violuric acid
2:32 Precipitating the product
3:12 Colorful violurate chem
5:27 How strong are the colors?
6:16 Thanking my sponsors
7:32 More coming soon!

[@pottingsoil723]

Surprised to see such vibrant colors that isn't transition metal, very cool.

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

I'm honestly a little surprised you didn't make some turbo barbiturate out of the barbituric acid, lol. Violurates are beautiful. I love colorful chemistry, I'm currently making a bunch of copper salts an complexes to put in little vials for display.

[@Diycrazystuff]

I make ampoules

[@Diycrazystuff]

I've made liquid chlorine and bromine ampoules so far

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

@@Diycrazystuff I'd love to do that, but I don't know anywhere closer than about an hour drive that sells dry ice. One of the few crappy things about rural Arkansas. Pretty much anything else I can order to be delivered, but dry ice isn't one of those things.

[@Diycrazystuff]

@Chemistry of Questionable Quality that sucks man its alot of fun, but the chlorine ampoules are terrifying because of the high pressure. I'm always scared it will pop, and I will get burnt and poisoned with chlorine

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

@@Diycrazystuff make sure to keep them in a padded container outside or somewhere with really good ventilation and it should be ok.

[@antozon5070]

Try Fe(II)! You'll be surprised how deep and intense the blue color is that you'll get.

[@nilnull5457]

This is one of the more fun chem channels with a sub-100k sub count.

[@sebastianmaier5328]

Please add mechanism of reaction and structures of your chemicals. Makes it much easier to follow. Thanks for the video.

[@christopherleubner6633]

Forbidden cool aid. These salts may be very good for use as lasing dyes or saturation absorber dyes. Would be interesting to spectro them for absorbtion and emission peaks. 🤓❤

[@lacertaemusic]

That would be amazing to see a gradient of all colors just with chemicals

[@andrewbounds]

This is a great demonstration. I am (very slowly) working on making 1,3-dimethyl violuric acid.

[@dizzious]

Very cool! Pigment videos are always awesome for some reason

[@AJBlueJay]

So colorful 😍

[@koukouzee2923]

This is so cool You should make a thermochromic compound

[@user-xj8wy4uu1q]

😎

[@pilifx]

I remember doing this near the end of high school. The amount I made was enough to keep a fountain in the building red for weeks. Strangely, the color went away after I finished my final exam and left that hellscape for good 🤓

[@Esterified80]

Very nice colors and intresting salts I'm interested if you gonna prepare isocyanides by the formamide dehydration route or with chloroform which is low yielding and maybe forms other stinky by products that will contaminate the isocyanide smell. Another idea is to do a closed space test (abandoned building for example). Also seeing reactions from other people would be cool.

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Low yielding all the way!

[@zodd0001]

Very nice job, I did not know these compounds before. But... there are more colorful ones, for example may aromatics.

[@SodiumInteresting]

Did you see the videos I also put up this week on violurates, I did 4 or 5 salts, failed at my attempt making an ethylenediamine violurate (it might have needed an acid catalyst), I plan to make a few more, like triethylamine, cesium, acetylacetone, hexamine. I've not heard these refered to as most colourful in the world but violuric acid is certainty pretty crazy.

[@prostrongmanzack]

Nice with fellow chemist!❤

[@thomassynths]

2:35 im pretty sure if you drink that, you restore to full health and mana.

[@jhyland87]

Should do a synth on barbituric acid too.

[@RhoGamingYT]

This look fun to play with

[@wkjeeping9053]

Hydrochloric acid use to be used to clean aluminum and stainless steel. About 20 years ago the u.s. fda and osha deemed it cancerous and unsafe to use in commercial or industrial use.

[@nomythstudios]

I know i have said it before but seriously you and the plasma channel are underrated 👏

[@VoidHalo]

Interesting trivia, when Baeyer discovered barbituric acid, he apparently named it after a woman named barbara. But, it's never been found who exactly she was.

[@27.minhquangvo76]

I think tert-butyl alcohol just doesn't want to form esters. It's just too sterically bulky on its own, and to form the tert-butyl carbocation in reasonable amounts, you need highly concentrated sulfuric acid (an extremely harsh reaction condition). Even then, the carbocation can deprotonate to form isobutylene, and it can react with other tert-butyl carbocations to form diisobutylene.

[@midwestchem368]

I need to get on the violurate train! I have wanted to make heavy metal violurates like lead, cadmium, maybe arsenic, and maybe uranium. Uranium salts make me a bit nervous though 😬

[@Se9n.]

I find the best way to see if a energy drink works for me is by going on a run and seeing how focused and how I feel during it.

[@mmmhorsesteaks]

Oh yeah!

[@lightdark00]

Ohh Yeah! 🧱🧱🧱

[@______IV]

If you want to see some truly amazing colors, mix up a batch of lysergic acid diethylamide.

[@Felipe-mg1pw]

Can you make some synthetic food coloring like Brilliant blue FCF?

[@owouwu2859]

I wonder if you could use these as paint pigment

[@brick2392]

I like how my man said, fairly dangerous like what is actually dangerous than lol😂

[@the_newt_nest]

The good yellow chemistry

[@custos3249]

About time someone made angry kool-aid

[@scotttod6954]

Came to the comment section to say the same thing.

[@avi5134]

The change was beautiful but i wonder what will happen if you dry those precipitates will they retain the colour?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Yes, they should. There was a post on Science Madness about violurates and someone had a bunch of them dried out.

[@avi5134]

@@LabCoatz_Science that's great i was thinking of making it..thanks for answering and keep making such good content 👍

[@DancingRain]

Oh, that's cool! I wonder what europium violurate would look like, and if it would fluoresce red like most europium salts do.

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Cool idea...I don't have europium, but I do have some samarium, so maybe I'll try that sometime!

[@DancingRain]

@@LabCoatz_Science Samarium salts tend to have orange fluorescence, so that could be cool too 😎

[@williambouthillier8611]

What position of the violuric acid were you hoping to esterify? Anyway I don't think you can generate most tert-butyl ester through fischer esterification simply because it's such a bulky and weak nucleophile that the dehydration into isobutylene gas is probably much faster than the esterification itself. You might be able to generate the ester by Sn1 using an electrophilic reagent like tert-Butyl bromide

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Honestly, I was just "going for it", lol. Tertiary alcohols tend to be more reactive than primary or secondary alcohols (you can add HCl to a primary or secondary alcohol like ethanol or isopropanol and get no immediate reaction, while a tertiary alcohol will usually react immediately), so I was kinda hoping it would just work. But, chemistry doesn't always happen like that! And you're probably right: if I used something like t-butyl chloride with sodium violurate, I might be able to get the t-butyl violurate.

[@williambouthillier8611]

@@LabCoatz_Science But I'm still curious, are you trying to alkylate the oxygen on the nitrogen, the nitrogen itself or the carbonyl? Because to me it doesn't look like there's much to esterify

[@williambouthillier8611]

@@LabCoatz_Science and yes, that's because the Sn1 reaction is much faster in the presence of an acid AND the carbocation is much more stable. So in a sense, yes that means you generate the isobutyl carbocation but since your product is in low concentration vs the acid and the solvent, I'm guessing elimination is much faster in this case.

[@cake4919]

@@williambouthillier8611 Yeah, the reaction doesn't really make any sense to me, violuric acid doesn't really have any positions that it can form any esters like that, especially with an alcohol as bulky and sterically hindered as t-butanol. To make t-butylammonium violurate you would need to use t-butylamine as a base...

[@williambouthillier8611]

@@cake4919 I mean you technically can alkylate or acylate the oxime at the oxygen position, but usually that's done with a coupling reagent such as DCC, HATU, PyBOP and so on. I'm not sure you could do that on one of the carbonyls or the oxime nitrogen though

[@user-je3fx6li3w]

Perhaps this substance is used somewhere for the production of art paints or for dyeing fabrics ... That would be logical.

[@Sigmatechnica]

Nice. Do they do anything interesting under UV?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

I'm not sure, I don't have a UV lamp and there haven't been any reports of violurates being fluorescent. Might be neat to test though!

[@srremus9781]

You should add the formulas and reactions so the viewer has a easier time to spot the differences and sc

[@DUKE_of_RAMBLE]

So can you make purdy purdy crystals out of those? (ignoring the hazard of handling them)

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Probably, yes!

[@Giorgio_Caniglia]

Can I add them on Paint or are they corrosive?

[@CDCI3]

Was your sodium nitrite solution green, or am I crazy? Is that something that normally happens with aqueous sodium nitrite?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Looking back, I think it was slightly! The nitrite itself is colorless, but I think my pipette might've have something on it that caused it change colors (maybe some stray HCl, which would cause it to form nitrous acid, which is greenish blue).

[@rodriguezfranco3839]

Do you think you could do some sick aluminium anodizing using those colorfull chemicals ?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Maybe!

[@SodiumInteresting]

​​@@LabCoatz_Science I'd be interested in it's durability, do violurate complexes on metal surface provide any rust protection as well as cosmetic appeal? I guess they're kind of water soluble and neither a dye or a pigment. Colour is very ph dependent and the solid in some cases is very different in colour to the solution. I wonder how they are over time with exposure to light

[@KYO297]

Your tone makes it sound like being colorful is a bad thing lol

[@ewbaite]

I guess this makes a lot of conjugated double bonds somehow

[@prblm.7790]

Forbidden soda

[@TONiT3CH]

👍👍👍

[@jhyland87]

1:43 Is it me, or is your nitrite mix colored? It looks like it has a green layer on top. Am I seeing things?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

I think a bit of HCl got into it, causing it break down into nitrous acid, which can be bluish-green.

[@stick-Iink]

Wait how did you get the hydrazine 😳😳😳

[@LabCoatz_Science]

I got the hydrazine sulfate from Backyard Science 2000 (it can also be made at home though), and I freebased it with sodium hydroxide to get free aqueous hydrazine. I'm actually hoping to do a video on making anhydrous hydrazine at some point, so stay tuned!

[@stick-Iink]

@@LabCoatz_Science If you are going to make anhydrous hydrazine, I think it would be the first youtube video of its synthesis on youtube. Very cool! (do stay safe though, I'm sure you're familiar with the hazards)

[@maksymiliankucharczak8572]

Anyone know what compounds should I use to make other violurates? I mean like copper, manganese, chromium?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Probably the hydroxides, but you could also try reacting some of their salts (nitrates, chlorides, etc.) with sodium violurate...

[@maksymiliankucharczak8572]

@@LabCoatz_Science thanks a lot and one question because the simple formula of adding metal oxide to acid won't work right?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

@@maksymiliankucharczak8572 it might, but I'm not sure.

[@maksymiliankucharczak8572]

@@LabCoatz_Science alright regardless, thanks for your help and btw your content is amazing❤️keep going with it!

[@TheBackyardChemist]

I wonder what would the calcium violurate look like?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

Not sure...now I wish I had tested some on my calcium hydroxide! I think the resulting salt might be orange, since strontium (another group 2 element) gives an orange violurate...

[@SodiumInteresting]

@@LabCoatz_Science yeah

[@manyshnooks]

Am i the only bee that was horrified at barbituric acid not being used to make anything uh, psychoactive?

[@sk_1029]

anyone noticed the round bottom flask was made in india

[@frogz]

did you say dopamine? i could use some of that!

[@LabCoatz_Science]

We all could, but not in the way I'll be making it, haha! It turns out that taking dopamine either orally or intravenously only causes a dangerous increase in blood pressure for a very short time, and not unparalleled bliss like one might think!

[@PotionsMaster666]

Can you please cite the source that you're following ? Thank you 🙂

[@LabCoatz_Science]

It's just 1 mole of barbituric acid to 1 mole of sodium nitrite with enough water to keep everything dissolved when hot. I don't really have a source to cite, but you can find a write-up of this synthesis on Science Madness: www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=156755

[@mrjoe332]

My thirsty ass could not work with barbituric acid

[@graealex]

Well, the ability to turn yellow liquids into purple would solve a lot of problems that a few chemists have.

[@martinkostov3392]

So like solvatochromism?

[@jansenart0]

Oh, just casual test tube of hydrazine.

[@LabCoatz_Science]

As terrifying as that might seem, it's not even the worst one: freebased hydroxylamine can spontaneously detonate when the concentration exceeds 50%!

[@athenachristinemusic]

Omg

[@WaffleStaffel]

I notice multiple people often working on the same substances at the same time. Is it synchronicity? www.youtube.com/@SodiumInteresting/search?query=violurates

[@LabCoatz_Science]

No clue, I just had barbituric acid on hand and I wanted to film something with it, lol!

[@synoptic4753]

The lilac was too brief

[@wiwingmargahayu6831]

Zamzam water

[@Line-Ways]

Green is my favourite color, why no green

[@LabCoatz_Science]

I didn't have anything that would make green at the time, but I would've if I did!

[@dominicadams9966]

Backyardscience2000!

[@danielbickford3458]

Your good enough to eat comment made me wonder, what does it taste like?

[@LabCoatz_Science]

With all that NaOH...probably pretty soapy and bitter, lol!

[@michael-tn3vq]

First hell yeah

drink it

[@oneaboveallferrarifan2725]

Snort the whole thing