Hey everyone!
I am a solid 10 years mixer. I am trying to wonder how a commercial ejuice stays clear for so long.
For example: Mango strawberry.
I have tried about 40 different mango flavors, all of them change to yellow in about 20 days.
I bought a mango strawberry from pop vapors and stays clear for months! How the hell????
I tried several nicotine brands. I am currently using the best of the best nicotine of the world and my mango still changes the freaking color.
No matter what I do, citric acid, malic acid, ascorbic acid, changing the flavors, changing the flavor percentages, changing the nic, changing the VG, the PG, the storage…everything.
Does commercial ejuice has any secret for that?
Anyone know something about it?
my juices stay clear forever. im 100% sure its the nicotine. and keeping it cool of course.
Damn mate, I tried Carolina extracts, TFN, I even brought nicotine from Switzerland and still the same results. I’m not alone in my business, I have a chemist and he is trying to figure it out too.
I'm living in switzerland and never heard of swiss nicotine and I really want to test it. I'm always ordering from hiliq. Can you tell me how the company making the nicotine is called?
Another tip, my juices became dark when I used freebase nic. After switching to nic salts my juices will have the same color for months. When the original juice was clear it will stay clear.
I've found more acidic juices (things with citrus fruit flavorings lemon/lime/grapefruit, added citric acid, using more acidic salt nic) yellow slower, while at the same time many types of flavors like creams/custards just don't taste right until they've yellowed.
I'd guess that bigger brands (that potentially formulate their own flavors or get flavor houses to make unique flavors for them) might add in preservatives like citric acid? Might go a little further than us DIYers in balancing the pH so it stabilizes faster/better? Might use professional mixing equipment that minimizes air exposure to the mixture before bottling? Lots of ??? maybes.
Probably wouldn't be that difficult to get some litmus strips and test the pH of some lighter and darker juices.
PG is known to react with food flavorings when it's used in acidic or basic conditions. Likely bringing the juice more towards a neutral acidity will be enough to stop most yellowing.
Yeah he mentioned he tried that route on his first post
I know, it's something I looked into when I got a bottle of juice that didn't change color. To the point a few months in I asked the maker if they even bothered to add nic. I've had them go slower (stored at room temp in a dark space) and they always go at least light yellow, except just that one bottle... remains clear to this day (years later.) I still doubt there is nic in it, though, as the seller turned out to be super shady xD
All I can really do is share my limited findings, that citrus/bending pH more acidic, slowed the yellowing some. Salt nic tends to move things a little towards acidic, depending on which acid they made the salt nic with it could go either way - black in 3 months or mildly yellow. And the unanswered questions I was left with when looking into it.
Hey good information about Salt nic and the acids. My experience with citric acid are wide. I really used it and have some interesting results. First results was that using 5mg or 2 mg of citric acid, made me use about 100% more flavoring so it taste close to the original recipe. Other interesting result was that the ejuice got yellow anyway in the same amount of time but a lighter yellow.
An great information I read from you is that salt nicotine has acids to control the nicotine ph.
Definitely, most of you guys talked about the salt nicotine, which is something I need to put on observation.
I mix for myself and my wife. All of my preferred mixes turn yellow and the single one that I mix for her stays clear.
Mine are all bakery and tobacco mixes and hers is a strawberry, watermelon and apple mix.
Strap on, yee. If you don’t have it yet, buy FLV Guanabana and mix your wifey Green Bastard Strap On
I don't think the brand of nic has anything to do with it. I just took out a bottle that I mixed up in September and it is clear as glass. Meanwhile a different e-juice that I made two weeks ago is a lovely light golden shade. The chubby gorilla bottles are the same and the nicotine is from the same place and the same batch.
I’m definitely agree with you. I am still looking for that flavor concentrate that won’t change my ejuice color. Because, definitely the problem is not the nicotine. I mixed other flavor and stays clear, but this specifically one, mango, change. I starting to think that flavors companies, when they are creating a flavor like mango, try to mimic the natural changes as the real fruit does.
Personally I've never cared if my juice is clear or not but I have heard people say "clear juice means clean coils." If you're selling this juice then you're either going to have to educate your customers or look for a different mango and strawberry.
Have you tried mixing those two flavors with and without sweetener? That's the only thing I can think of for you to try before you start looking for a different company to buy that flavor from.
Its flavour dependant, i have mixes that stay clear over a year and others everything from clear to dark brown some in a day and some in weeks or months. I only buy nicselect nic. Flavour is illegal here but even before only about 30% of the flavours at stores were actually crystal clear, 60 were yellow and 10% were brown (depending on flavour), i don’t know why but i have observed some bizarre colour changes with different flavours and combinations of different flavours.
> Flavour is illegal here
Where?
Nova Scotia, I think Canada wide now Edit: https://novascotia.ca/news/release/?id=20211014010
I notice that freebase vs salt nicotine make all the difference with freebase changing and salt not. This is consistent regardless of the flavor concentrates used.
Salt nic has those oxygen molecules bonded up thus the oxidation is greatly reduced. 6mg freebase gets dark, but 30mg salt nic stay pretty light. Heat light and air speed up the oxidation of the nic turning it dark in color and degrading it.
No idea why you are being downvoted, you basically have two things that will change color in eliquid:
- Nicotine
- Flavorings
Heat, light (UV) (which essentially oxidizes), and oxidization. Oxidization is just O2 interacting with molecules, binding to them and breaking them down into parts. Brewers and others deal with this constantly, it's part of a wine aging. They'll often add sulphites to a wine both to stop bacterial growth and to cause the O2 introduced to bind to it instead of other components in the wine/beer/etc. Do not add sulphites to eliquid
Nic salts are that, nicotine prebound in a way that makes it less reactive. Different flavorings break down into different things when they oxidize, vanillin is something I know more about than other compounds, but it is varied.
Email one of those clear juice companies and ask which mango flavour they're buying from, chances are there's 10,000 different kinds of mango flavouring. Cuz it's probably not the nicotine, I say this because of the obvious differences between fruits being usually clear and usually all custards being yellow, coming from the same company with the same nic the obvious difference is the flavour used.
Yeah, they probably mix in oxygen-free chambers.
It's the oxidation of the nicotine. I accidentally mixed a batch and forgot the nic one time and it stayed clear for months.
Might be a large part of it.
I run a e-liquid production business since 5 years back, and we at least do our mixing oxygen-free. It adds a lot to the costs of production, but our nicotine liquids stay clear as water for at least 5 years (we still have crystal clear bottles of our very first batches) and counting.
When I started vaping 5 years ago vendors sold their juice in glass bottles. Hardly anyone does that nowadays. There is still permeability in plastics like LDPE, HDPE, and PET. Nothing beats a glass bottle
While technically true, for regular consumer usage PET should suffice.
We are actually testing out different types of long term storage in regular consumer freezers with high strength nicotine (tax evasion schemes for our country) and there is no real detectable degradation of high strength nicotine base (that was properly mixed under inert gases) between a quality HDPE, a regular Chubby Gorilla plastic PET, and glass (on going test for 3 years). LDPE can be a bit more risky.
For our own bulk batches we generally just use a lot of cold storage, inert gases, and HDPE cans with a 6 layer structure with barrier layers specifically designed to protect against permeation of gases.
Looking for different answers than you got 2 months ago?
https://redd.it/qvii0q
Why is it bothering you?
I sell my eliquids in my country, but my clients does not like when an ejuice change to yellow. I don’t know why. So I have to stick for what they like.
Tell them it's a natural process. And it's not effecting anything.
For what it's worth, CAP Sweet Mango stays clear in my experience. It's quite a good mango, too.
I'm not as adept as you are bro but I've been mixing for a year or so. My ejuices remain their original color. I just protect them from any source of light.