Reduction of Manganese. Colour change with KMnO4, Sucrose & NaOH

Hi all,

Just happen to see a video on colour change of the KMnO4. So I decided to try it out as the chemical needed is quite easy available.

You may have seen alot of people mixing sucrose, sodium hydroxide and potassium permanganate in youtube. This reaction occurs because the Manganese is being reduce from 7+ to 3+.

Therefore for every reduction of the manganese the state of colour is different which is why we can see the colour changes from purple (7+) to grey/blue (6+) to green (5+) to yellow (4+) and finally to orange (3+). Orange is a bit difficult to differentiate from yellow from my video. So in my video I just wrote the final colour is yellow.

Have a look at my video, it can be found in youtube too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9FQlxDu28U

Preparing placenta into powdered form

I have tried taking my own (or my baby?) placenta. As you should know in the market, people sell sheep placenta and claim that it will keep you look youthful. So after giving birth to my first child, I actually requested the hospital to give me back my placenta so it will not be so wasteful to throw such a good stuff.

However is quite scary to deal with real placenta with blood oozing out from it (see pic). I didn't know how my mother actually deal with it as I was under confinement so what I do is just rest and take care of my newborn. I just give her the recipe which I found in the internet and pass it to her to prepare for me.

Actually the taste is quite nice after being cooked and dried to powdered form. I treat it as pepper and sprinkle it on my rice. Is quite sad that now I am expecting a 2nd baby, but my mum said only the first placenta can be consumed and not from the 2nd baby.

I am not sure whether the placenta have helped me or not, but I really look quite radiant during my confinement period even though I always look radiant. But I suppose one should be quite weak after delivery.

Anyway I am here to share the recipe on the preparation of the placenta, so anyone who is pregnant can keep your placenta and try it.

1) Wash the excess blood from the placenta. Put fresh ginger slices, half a lemon (sliced) and hot pepper slices (or red capsicum) together with it and steam for 15 min.

2) Turn the placenta and steam for another 15 min to ensure both side are cooked evenly. Make sure there is no juice or blood coming out when pricked with a fork. If not steam again until it is fully cooked.

3) After steaming, slice the placenta into strips that are as thin as possible so as to reduce the time for it to dried up.

4) Place all the strips over a aluminium foil and baked it in the oven using as low heat as possible until it is completely brittle-dry (this may takes a few hours). Make sure you turn the strips occasionally so it will not get burnt and certain part is still not dried.

5) Once it is done, try to remove and throw away those part that are burnt then put the rest into an electric grinder and grind it to become powdered form. Make sure the strips is cool before grinding as the heat may produce water vapour and cause the powder to be wet and this will cause the powder to spoil easily.

6) For prolong storage, (if you only treat it as pepper like me instead of having 1 big spoonful and put it in your mouth) is better to keep the powder in a fridge.

Hope you will find this useful and do feedback to me whether it has done any miracle for you.