Vitamin C Used To Detect The Presence Of Vanillin

[Markus Bindhammer] recently made a discovery while conduction chemistry experiments in his home lab. Ascorbic acid can be used to detect the presence of Vanillin. The reaction starts as a color change, from a clear liquid to a dark green. When he continued to heat the mixture he ended up with the surface crystallization seen above.

Vanillin is an organic compound which you will commonly find in vanilla extract, with the synthetic variety being used in imitation extract. Ascorbic acid is a type of vitamin C. When [Markus] first observed the color change he though it could be due to metallic contamination, but running the experiment again without the use of metal tools or probes, produced the same result.

You can see in the clip after the break that it doesn’t take long to turn green. The vanillin must be heated to 130 degrees C before adding the ascorbic acid or the color change will not occur. He believes this can be a reliable way to detect the presence of Vanillin in a substance.

36 thoughts on “Vitamin C Used To Detect The Presence Of Vanillin

    1. The difference between Real and Fake vanillin (C3H8O3) is that one is made in a fruit and the other in a chemical reactor.

      To distinguish natural from industrial vanilla you have to look out for other chemicals that naturally occur in Vanilla. A few like Lignin arent that good for that since they are the base for synthetic vanilla.

      One could postulate that industrial Vanilla is cleaner then Natural so you could maybe look out for the Inpurity content.

      1. +1 for the post. Clear, concise, cogent, pertinent.
        +1 for the story. It’s nice to see “science” being done, at home, with real results. “Crowd Science”?
        Hey, I wonder if Ascorbic Acid and Vanillin are in the Open Source Substances Spectroscopy wiki (mentioned in a previous article on home-made spectrometer…)? If not, they will be, soon.

  1. This is using 5g of pure vanillin, which is a lot. Vanilla extract only contains 0.1% vanillin or so, most substances one might want to test would contain less. 130°F precludes the possibility to do this in water solution, as well as some other solvents.

    Chemistry experts, is this really a practical test?

      1. Anything that has visible color (and no suspended particulates) can be tested on a spectrophotometer. In addition many substances which are colorless can also be tested in the ultra violet range. But anything which has a visible color absorbs visible light which is what a spectrophotometer measures.

  2. So, I have to heat up my tapioca pudding and then add Vit-C to make sure moms put vanilla in. Check.

    (Other than this, I am completely clueless as to why one would need to detect the presence of vanillin?)

  3. I doubt that it would be a practical test on its own. Probably the same result will turn up with any sort of analogues of vanillin and ascorbic acid. I’d be surprised if the reaction was specific. Incidentally, vanillin is vanillin, wheter produced synthetically or extracted from vanilla. What might vary is the presence of other substances in artificial vanilla flavoring. Oh, and I believe both substances have two specular forms, so it’s probably possible to distinguish the natural version from the synthesized through polarimetry, the synthesized version being constituted of 50% of either variation.

  4. Heads up here folks.

    Vit C in contact with benzoate will produce benzene.
    Don’t know if it is sodium benzoate, or potass, or both.

    Think it only has to be above 80f too.

    so all those fruit juices you are drinking to be healthy are cooking your goose.

    this was a published paper, and was directed straight to NIH, but no follow thru’s or warnings to parents either.

    1. Do you own a car morganism? Better stop pumping your own gas if your that afraid of trace amounts of benzene, that gasoline smell means you just inhaled an order of magnitude more while topping it up than you’d get from chugging soda all day.

      1. I’m pretty sure you got it, alcohol burners are pretty cheap to build and everything but a cotton ball in a crucible works too.
        My question is whether the alcohol he’s using is denatured alcohol or isopropyl…

  5. Might want to look up TLC stains. Apparently Vanillin is used in this technique to detect a variety of chemical compounds. I know almost nothing about TLC stains, but it looks like it’s used (uncommonly) in organic chemistry. So maybe an orgo chemist can say more?

  6. This really was a neat find, thanks HaD. Now I’ll just use an arduino to calculate heat time etc. just for the people that are like “yay, a no arduino hack”… ^ j/k
    I’m going to go show this to my old chem teacher tomorrow.

  7. Well, I am an organic chemist. Most likely what is happening is the vanillin is forming a dimer called vanilloin. You would need to use IR spectroscopy or mass spectroscopy to be definitive. Vanillin is used to generate color in a few organic or biochemical analyses.

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