Jelly is a colloid.
Many common food items (jelly) and other products (paper) are colloids. They appear to be singular components but actually are comprised of two separate things. These molecule clumps are often murky or opaque in appearance, such as fog and milk. And they do not separate while standing, such as oil and water do when they are combined. Add this to my Recipe Box.
Colloid Defined
Milk, a colloid, contains butter fat.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines colloid as being a substance. Colloid is a substance that is able to disperse its particles throughout another substance (like butter fat does in milk or rain water does in the atmospheric gases). When this dispersion takes place it is almost impossible to tell that it is two substances instead of one that is being looked at, since it appears to be just one.
Colloid: A Substance Mixture
According to the online website Science Clarified.com, there are three main mixture types: solutions, suspensions, and substances. Colloids are substance mixtures. While the particles that make up solution mixtures are approximately one nanometer in size (extremely small), and the particles that comprise suspension mixtures are larger than 1,000 nanometers---particles that make up substance mixtures (like gelatin) fall somewhere in between, 1 to 1,000 nanometers (see Science Clarified link in References Section below).
Types
There are many types of colloids. There are food colloids, plastic colloids, colored glass colloids and even paper colloids. Colloids are common and vary in type because any solid, gas or liquid combination has the potential to produce a colloid. Some examples of the different types of colloids include butter, mayonnaise, milk, jelly, gelatin, whipped cream, plaster, muddy water, paper and colored glass.
Colloid Components
Clouds are a colloid.
Two components are required to make a colloid: some type of colloid particle and some type of dispersing mechanism (medium). The particle must be able to interact within another environment. For example, when rain (a liquid) is dispersed (interacts) in a gaseous atmosphere it will produce fogs that take the form of mist or clouds. The same can be seen when bubbles (a gas particle substance) is dispersed into a liquid (like a soft drink). The colloid will foam.
Significant
Colloids look uniform to the human eye---meaning they look homogenous, or as if they automatically go together and are not two separate items. A good example of this is milk. The butter fat used to make milk (and its lumpiness) is not evidenced by the human eye at all; instead, the opaque-looking liquid milk is what you see.
Tags: colored glass, paper colloids, particles that, Science Clarified, some type
