{
    "id": 1070844,
    "title": "How are sweets coloured?",
    "slug": "how-are-sweets-coloured",
    "type": "page",
    "url": "https://sweeties.net/wiki/how-are-sweets-coloured/",
    "modified": "2026-09-26T03:52:03+01:00",
    "excerpt": "Colour goes into a sweet at different stages: stirred into the cooked syrup, worked in on the slab, added in the last coats in a pan, or printed on top.",
    "content_text": "Colour is one of the first things you notice about a sweet, and makers can supply it as a liquid, a powder, a gel or a paste. When it goes in depends on how the sweet is made.\nWhen the colour goes in\nBoiled sweets and lollipops. Colour is added after the sugar has been cooked. The machinery maker Loynds describes adding liquid colours and flavours by syringe to the hot batch on a cold, oiled slab and folding them in like dough. At Spangler, which makes Dum Dums, colour and flavour are added in a mixing bowl after cooking: see how are lollipops made?Striped sweets. For candy canes, the white candy and the coloured stripes are prepared separately, and the stripes are laid onto the white log on a heating table: see how are candy canes made?Panned sweets. For hard panned sweets, one trade guide builds up the colour in the final five or six coats of syrup, so the colour sits in the outer shell: see what is sugar panning?Jellies and gums. Colour is mixed into the syrup before it is poured into starch moulds: see what is starch moulding?Printed sweets. Love Hearts are pressed from coloured sugar powder, and then the message on the front is picked out in red food colour so it can be read: see how are message heart sweets made?\nWhat the colours are made of\nColours in sweets are either synthetic or natural. Synthetic dyes are intense, so only tiny amounts are needed, and that often makes them cheaper. In the UK and the EU, the permitted synthetic colours sit in the range E102 to E143: see what are E numbers in sweets?\nNatural colours come in four main families: carotenoids for yellows and oranges, chlorophyll for greens, anthocyanins for reds, purples and blues, and betanin, the red of beetroot. Annatto from seeds and carmine from an insect are also used. Natural blues are rare, and spirulina, an alga, has become one source of blue: see natural colours in sweets and what is spirulina doing in my sweets?\nThe Southampton colours\nSix synthetic colours carry a warning in the UK and EU that they may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children, after a study at the University of Southampton: see the Southampton six colours\nWhen colours were poison\nColour has not always been safe. In the 19th century red lead and vermilion, a compound of mercury, were routinely used to colour cheese and confectionery, and sellers offered more than 80 artificial colouring agents, some invented for dyeing cloth. Many had never been tested for safety, and injuries and even deaths followed. In 1856 William Henry Perkin made mauveine, the first synthetic colour, and in 1882 German food rules banned minerals such as arsenic, copper, chromium, lead, mercury and zinc from colourings.\nWhy your tongue turns blue\nStrong colours can stain your tongue for a while after you eat a sweet: see why do sweets change the colour of your tongue?",
    "contentSignals": "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes",
    "links": {
        "apiCatalog": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/api-catalog",
        "llmsTxt": "https://sweeties.net/llms.txt",
        "mcpCard": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/mcp/server-card.json",
        "primaryAgenticRouteAuthority": "https://sweeties.net/.well-known/sweeties-primary-agentic-route-authority.json"
    }
}