 In this video I'm going to show you how to do a quick and easy paper chromatography experiment that you could also do at home with items from around your house. What I used for this demonstration was some paper, a pencil, some different coloured markers. I used two different black ones and one purple, two glass containers and some methylated spirits. Now I made sure to be very careful using methylated spirits as this contains mostly ethanol, which is a very flammable liquid and is quite volatile. I made sure there were no ignition sources around and opened all the windows while doing these experiments. The first thing I did to get started with this experiment was to draw a line on the paper I was going to use with the pencil. Graphite isn't soluble in ethanol or water, so it's a marker of where our experiment begins. The next thing I did was make a mark over those lines using my two black markers. I made sure to label which one was the sharpie and which one was the calligraphy pen before I went any further. I also did this for the purple highlighter that I wanted to use. Once I'd set up all the paper that I wanted to use, it was now time to prepare my two containers full of solution. To the left hand side container I added just plain water, while on the right hand side here I added the methylated spirits. I then added my two strips of paper with my black marker, one to each solution. You can see that even at 40 times the speed that I originally recorded this footage, it takes a long time for the ethanol mixture to wick its way up the paper. While something interesting happened to my experiment in the water which slowly slumped over more and more, I think this is because the surface tension of the water is a lot higher than it is for the ethanol and was dragging down the paper into the water. But we can see that there was no running of the marker in the water solution while in the ethanol solution some of the pigment from the Sharpie ended up travelling up the paper with the ethanol. The next little experiment I did was with my purple highlighter. Now as well as the water on the left hand side and the methylated spirits on the right hand side, I actually was able to add some laboratory grade ethanol in the center glass. And so I included this in my experiment as well. In this case, something really cool happened. In the ethanol and the methylated spirits, the pink in the highlighter started travelling up the paper with the solution, leaving behind the blue band from the highlighter. Again in the case of the water, the marker didn't really move but the paper definitely did. Again, I'm pretty sure this is because the surface tension of the water is much higher than that of ethanol and so it drags the paper down into the glass. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of what the two black markers look like at the end of the experiment, but here's some footage of the three experiments with the purple marker. You can see that the water definitely didn't move any of the purple highlighter, while the ethanol and methylated spirits moved the pink dye quite a bit, but didn't really move the blue dye at all. So there you have it. A straightforward experiment you can do at home with some paper and some household solvents. You could try this with different coloured markers or with a multitude of other things. You could rub some plant leaves on paper and see if you can separate out chlorophyll, or you could let some coffee dry on the paper and see what happens. Make sure you stay safe and have some fun with it.