Chemistry labels for your crayons

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Teacher is probably more likely to be using copper carbonate…
(and Barium Nitrate is solid at room temperature, not a gas)
Just sayin…

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What’s the chemical symbol for “burnt umber?”

Wow, all these years I thought umber was some kind of plant. TIL it’s a mineral, so my joke sucks!

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They’re an amusing novelty, but I think billing them as “educational” is hugely overselling them. I mean:

they will think “I want Barium Nitrate Ba(NO3)2 Flame” and then when
they take chemistry in high school and their teacher sets some gas on
fire and it makes a green color and they ask the class what chemical it
was your student will know it was Barium!

A chemistry teacher might do this exactly once, if at all, and the knowledge will otherwise be of highly limited utility, to put it mildly. Also, isn’t barium nitrate a salt and not a gas? I get the feeling whoever wrote this is neither a chemist nor an educator.

…And isn’t fluorine yellower than that? Not that the overwhelmingly vast majority of scientists are ever likely to encounter an appreciable quantity of fluorine gas.

A naturally occurring mix of manganese and iron oxides. It has a lot of shades depending on the ratio of the oxides. Burnt umber is the same mixture after heat treatment.

Pyrotechnic chemistry.

It is. But if it is put into flame, it makes a lousy green color. It makes a better green if it is combined with some chloride. The BaO and BaOH radiating species are rather lousy yellow-green, the bright barium green is BaCl. (Yes, they are non-stoichiometric, non-equilibrium species, existing only in the flame.)

(I wrote quite some of the tables.)

That’s quite likely. Or, more accurately, they are a bit but not enough of both.

Somewhat.

Which is kind of a shame, as it seems to be a fun gas. (Note, “fun gas” does not mean it is usable as a “laughing gas”, do not ever confuse these two! :smiley: )

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What good is it without the Recommended Daily Allowance?

If they’d stuck to simple inorganic compounds identified by formula, I’d have been a lot more on board. But when you include compounds like haemocyanin, well, that sounds “sciencey” but the name tells you nothing about its chemistry, so it might as well be called “sea blue” or whatever. And anyway, many common artists’ colors are sold with names like Alizarin Crimson and Phthalocyanine Blue (those being the specific molecules that give them their color).

Is fun gas the singular of fun guy?

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