A blogger made chicken translucent with Doritos dye, and the physics is the refractive index

The refractive-index trick

The blog post replicates part of Ou et al. (Science, 2024). Tissue is opaque mostly because water (n ≈ 1.33) sits next to proteins and lipids (n ≈ 1.45), which scatters light. A dissolved dye raises the water's index toward the tissue's.

What actually happened in the kitchen

The author skipped the original 0.62 M, 40 °C conditions as unsafe. A ~0.56 M mix crystallized and failed after 6 hours; a ~0.19 M soak turned slightly translucent at 12, and a 2 mm slice showed the grid beneath. The result is qualitative, with no measured transmittance, and the dye was only >80% pure.

The thread pushed on dose and surface finish

On safety, a veteran commenter put numbers on the dose:

"...to get the effect the concentration must be quite high, like a 5% solution for 12 hours. That's like 50x the concentration of tartrazine in fake orange juice, that is probably dangerous to drink or take a bath." — gus_massa, HN user since 2008 with 20k karma

On method, a high-karma commenter asked the author directly about the flaw nobody had tested:

"have you considered surface roughness of the sample as problem to transparency?" — _Microft, 37k-karma HN regular

He suggested water on both faces of the slice or freezing the meat before cutting, and the account claiming to be the author replied that it was "a great idea".

So the next replication has a to-do list: smooth cuts, index-matched water on the surfaces, and a spectrometer. And the dye bath is a lab step, not a recipe.