Can You Put Food Coloring In A Humidifier?

Have you ever thought of adding food color to your humidifier? What happens when the water inside your water tank of the humidifier is colored? What does it do to the machine?

All these questions are pretty relevant to cross your mind. We are here to answer them before you try it out.

What Happens If You Put Food Coloring in a Humidifier?

Now, let us think about the vapor that will be coming out of the humidifier. The evaporated moisture can be colored or not, depending on the type of humidifier in question. When you add the food coloring to a ‘warm mist’ humidifier, you can expect the water to merely be heated, boiled, and the vapor emitted without demonstrating any color.

The dye you have added to the water tank will be retained in the liquid state of the water. The water vapor that is dispersed is therefore going to be purely gas, free from any color. You can use the analogy of adding sugar to water, where the sugar completely dissolves in water.

What happens when we are using an evaporative humidifier? Well, the same. You will not see colored water vapor. Why so? Well, evaporative humidifiers merely fling the water onto a high surface area pad and blow the air throughout the water to cause it to evaporate. The dye gets sucked into the pad and does not, hence, enter the vapor.

However, when you are using a cool mist humidifier, you can expect a colored vapor. These will indeed be quite finely demonstrated. Why does this happen? The cool mist humidifier functions by propagating ultrasonic vibrations through the water. These vibrations cause the smaller water droplets to be formed, aided by the high surface tension of water.

This will also pull the vibrating water into the microscopic spheres. These droplets can then be blown out by the fan inside the humidifier. These will then evaporate quite fast, given the large surface area.

Does Food Coloring Evaporate with Water?

As mentioned above, this is only the case when it comes to cool mist humidifiers. When the air is dry, the water evaporates, leaving smaller particles of food coloring suspended in the air. However, when the air is moist, you can expect the water droplets to appear colored.

Usually, the compounds of the common food colorings are pretty large and not volatile. You can expect the colored humidity when the dye molecules are tiny and hence volatile.

Is Food Coloring in the Humidifier Dangerous to Health?

Well, given that we are talking about food coloring, you can expect it not to be dangerous for the stomach. However, you do not want it to be harmful to the lungs. You need to look into the effects of inhaling dye particles before considering the direct inhalation of the dyed vapors.

Furthermore, you may not want to wake up with a colored face or mouth in the morning if you leave the humidifier running all night with the food coloring inside.

Final Words

Now that you are aware that adding food coloring to the humidifier may or may not have any added visual result to your purpose of using the machine, you must have enough knowledge to prevent unwanted problems from arising by doing so. A clear understanding of the operations of a humidifier can justify why and how food coloring can or cannot fit with them.

There are several recommendations about this, but it will depend on the humidifier you are using at the end of the day. Hence, you must have expert knowledge about the brand of your machine and check ahead of time if dyes do or do not harm the operative features of the humidifier or your health.