Original post · Tue, October 6, 2020 · ND Owner
🔬 Curowhite and the Color of Curcumin 🔬
Lab
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
We have been getting a lot of confusion and questions on the color of Curowhite on our Facebook page, so I figured I would make a post here to address it. I am sure some people here are curious as well. To start, one of the major questions we have been getting is whether Curowhite is bleached to get rid of the color. I think many people are unaware of just how color works, which is why many people immediately jump to what they have experienced before. Many people have seen how chlorine bleach gets rid of color, so they fall back to that. I'll go through the details to clear things up.
What is color? Well color is simply our eyes interpreting the wavelengths of light being reflected back to us from an object. If an object is white, that means that the entire spectrum of visible light is being reflected back to our eyes. If we were to take out part of that spectrum before it reflected back to our eyes, we would see it as a specific color. In curcumin's case, we take out the blue hues, which means our eyes see the curcumin as orange. If we remove all wavelengths, we see black. It's all just our eyes interpreting the wavelengths of light being reflected back to us by objects.
So why is curcumin orange? Well from a chemistry perspective, color arises from the presence of a chromophores. Chromophores are parts of a molecule that form a conjugated pi system, which are made up of double carbon-carbon bonds. When you have a conjugated pi system in a molecule, they are able to capture photons as they pass. Since they are capturing some photons, they are absorbing some of the wavelengths of visible light, leading to only part of the spectrum being reflected back to our eyes. That's how color is made. Parts of the molecule are able to capture certain photons as they pass. Lengthening a conjugated system with more unsaturated bonds in a molecule will tend to absorb longer wavelengths of light. So the number of double carbon-carbon bonds in the conjugated pi system in a molecule will dictate which wavelengths are absorbed, and consequently which wavelengths are able to reflect back to our eyes. Chromophores are also how most HPLCs and UPLCs "see" the molecules they are assaying. They have UV detectors on them, which are measuring the reflectance off the analytes. The same goes for UV-VIS machines.
So why is Curowhite white? Well Curowhite is made by converting the curcuminoids in tumeric into tetrahydro curcuminoids, hexahydro curcuminoids and octahydro curcuminoids through a process called hydrogenation. This breaks the double carbon-carbon bonds on the central hydrocarbon chain in the curcuminoids. This breaks the conjugated pi system, which no longer allows photons to be captured as they pass. This means that the hydrogenated curcuminoids in Curowhite will reflect back the entire spectrum of visible light, not absorb the blue hues like normal curcuminoids would.
Here is an image I made to illustrate.
So you can see that the process of hydrogenating the curcuminoids removes the conjugated pi system, which removes the color! So how does chlorine bleach remove color? Well it does that through oxidation. It attacks the chromophores in a molecule by oxidizing them. It's a different process, but he concept is the same. You are removing the double carbon-carbon bonds in a conjugated pi system, which stops the molecules ability to capture photons as they pass. Bleaching is not used in the production of Curowhite, and the hydrogenation process of the curcuminoids actually improves their bioavailability and effects compared to normal curcuminoids. It's actually a really ingenious process. Curowhite also then encases the hydrogenated curcuminoids in a cyclodextrin, which improves bioavailability even more, and makes it water soluble. So that is how they make a curcuminoid product that is white and water-soluble!