I’m surprised that this characteristic of an extremely common dye—being used in its main application, as a dye—hasn’t been described before. Surely there’s some limitation that’s obvious to those skilled in the chemical and biological arts?
Or is it really just a matter of serendipity waiting til now to lead anybody down the path of trying it this way?
Maybe the concentration has to be high enough that this wouldn't happen often in practice? The point made below about mice having thinner skin makes sense too, though there are parts of the body where skin is quite thin, like ears and wrists.
I have a feeling that this will get tested by some intrepid YouTuber before the authors of the paper get approval from an ethics review board. I'll try to remember to Google this in a month or two.
>>The point made below about mice having thinner skin makes sense too, though there are parts of the body where skin is quite thin, like ears and wrists.
The article says it's only to the depth it penetrates, so given that you have a lot of skin, comparatively, I'd guess it'd be hard to distinguish from the dye staining you weirdly for a bit.
on this point curcumin aka tumeric has a quite a similar though not perfectly the same wavelength-adsorption profile (i.e. anything with a strong yellow color)
tumeric / curcumin is often used a magic skin treatment type dealie. question is why are not all these wanting-to-have-youthful-skin type people discovering transparency! answer is below but TLDR human skin is thicker and doses are still low.
some main points from the paper( damned paywell, see supplement)
> the dye only goes about 1mm deep, so maybe that works magic in a mice but not so good in humans nor noticable.
> the dye comes it at arnd 0.5-1 molar solution. gmw is 500 g/mol ish. so 1M solution is 500g in 1L or 0.5g in 1 mL aka 500 mg in 1 mL. Okay, fine, you prepare this and rub 500 mg on your big toe from a little 1 mL aliquot. the daily limit or whatever for the food dye is around 4 mg! Soooo...
>on the latter point, safety, the supplement had a bunch of stuff where they were like "we did all the normal blood tests on the mice, and looked at the tissue, and looked to see if they died later, and it all looks good"
Or is it really just a matter of serendipity waiting til now to lead anybody down the path of trying it this way?