Whenever SWIM extracts, it always comes out completely white...occasionally with a few pale yellow specks. But i've heard of yellow, orange, and even stranger colors. What does it mean when this happens? Is there a difference in potency?

there are actually conflicting reports about this

It is known that pure dmt is transparent/white crystals, so if SWIY got it like that, then its good

there is sometimes a yellow tint, and the common idea is that the yellow come from natural oils (tannins) from the plant, which are not dmt (sloppy techniques, heating up the naphta before separating, evaping instead of freeze precip, last pulls as opposed to the first pulls, STB teks instead of A-B teks, not so good plants, etc, are amongst the possible reasons for more yellow)... some people say their presence causes the smoke to be harsher.

in general, the darker/yellower/´oranger´/browner the dmt is, the more impure it is. Not that its a horrible thing, at least imo, because as long as its no chemicals and just a bit of some natural oils, its not too bad. But white is always the colour to aim anyways


with time, though, it seems that even white dmt does get darker/yellower, maybe some sort of oxidation process.. Potency doesnt seem to be affected too much, though, at least imo...


another last thing is that there are some reports (entropymancer can say better) that some of the yellow, specially this oily yellow that sometimes people end with, is psychoactive. Some people say even more psychoactive than dmt, and some people theorize it is some dmt oxide that seems to be very active. SWIM doesn´t really confirm this, though, and still thinks the whiter, the purer and stronger

that more or less confirms my thoughts on the subject, but some people from another forum tend to think differently.

some of them are referring to colors as they might be somehow different. Any other insight/experiences?

hmmm.. can you explain more what you mean? what do they say, that colours = different trips or different types of dmt or smt?

Some are saying that white is "pharmaceutical grade" (which is kind of laughable), while others say that they have had significantly different experiences with different colors. There are also comments that suggest that "The white stuff is just an extra, unnecessary crystallization process"...which swim found to be untrue.

I'm just trying to see if any of these claims hold any water. in swim's experience, they don't.

White is what we shoot for.

I smoked grey (white + slop), and it was good. I smoked oily yellow, and it burned my tongue and was mostly crap I didn't want. I froze that batch as well, but didn't filter, just to see. If I had frozen a little slower, and filtered it, all that yellow crap would've still been in solution.

Lesson learned: Freeze + filter = pwn.

Ive had orange ear wax that will annihilate your brain also white that does the same

I would say that appart from what was discussed above, the claim that different colours=different trips is a good example of self-suggestion

as for ´extra unnecessary process´ to make it white, well, unnecessary is obviously subjective. I would say that if one is doing it, might as well do it proper, and have the purest cleanest product possible. Half a day more won´t be so much trouble, imo, compared to the difference in purity it will make.

I've had significantly different experiences with the same batch of my clear/white crystals!!

Its all DMT, when its yellow or oily its just dirty, I'm guessing that would change the experience in some small way, I wouldn't think for the better.
Would you rather smoke KindBud or some Mexi-Brick weed? Same diffrence, they'll both get ya high but its actually enjoyable to smoke the KindBud and the high is better & smoother!! Right?

I've extracted the red alkaloid from the MHRB with Xylene once. The yeild was an orange/red wax and was definitly pychoactive but smoking it was a chore and the high was a diffused, uglied version of good DMT. I only smoked it the one time, its still sittin in storage.
my crystals are just much, much more enjoyable!!!

IMO

WS

yep..

but if I may nitpick: your analogy to the weed doesnt work, because with weed, its not only THC.. It has been reported that CBD and CBN influence the high (THC turns into CBD with time), so mexi brick would probably have indeed a different high, not just the whole taste thing

with dmt, though, you are right.. at least imo

THC turns into CBN

But anyway you are right. Minor/other components can certainly have many pharmacological effects, its not always easy to prove. Cannabis is a very good example of this. herbal drugs and crude extracts are just that crude. they are mixtures. thats why its so hard to prove how they work and thats also why the FDA doesnt even allow them to be sold as medicine. instead they are sold as "dietary supplements" with no real garuntee of quality.

what most people are doing when they extract spice is a crude extract. even if you do nice recrystallization there will still be something else there. but the whiter the spice is the cleaner it is for sure. as far as different subjective effects that could be a set and setting thing or minor components both of which cant simply be answered by a few peoples reports with product that could differ widely.

nitpicking the nitpicker, heh?


btw, I dont know if you can say that extracting spice is just a crude extract.. I mean, sure, claiming 100% would be silly, because there will always be at least 1 particle of dust or whatever.. and also loads of extracts out there are indeed quite impure..

but.. by looking through a microscope some white spice that has been washed, freeze precipitated and recrystalized, SWIM thinks a properly done extract can get good enough to be called ´pure´ (one couldnt see any impurities at all )

and yeah I also agree with what you said about set and setting and so on..

You may well get a pure alkaloid extract but even with Mimosa with its rather clean alk profile you are still extracting traces of other compounds; NMT- often cited as the cause of the 'bad bark' flap of a couple of years ago-, degradation products, biological precursors etc. Without serious labwork they are all there- however trace- in your pure alkoloidal extract.I'm not even sure if pro synthed chems are ever even totally free of their precursors.

Stoic, Stoic, Stoichiometry!!!!

Yeah. It happens, but we're shooting for "good enough"

I''ve not experienced much difference with slight variations in color

Fresh freezer spice that is very white, seems to be light and fluffy. upon being recrystallized it tends to turn a bit more yellowish, and get much more heavy and dense. I've not noticed any difference in the trip between the two though.

If you are evaporating, the temp at which you evaporate at I think may play a role in the final look of your dmt. When i've evap'd at a warm temp, the final product tends to be more like chunks of solid wax (but not waxy) and a darker color. Evapping at a cool temp (below room temp, 60-65?) i get a sparkly yellow tinted crystal growing on the glass. very pretty, shiny and clean looking crystal.

So I think what you do with the solvent after you pull it plays a pretty big role in what you end up with. The fact that you can turn white spice back into yellow spice by dissolving and evaporating must mean that whatever is in there, is going to remain, right?

I'm pretty sure its due to the fact the base form probably has a much lower melting point than the hydrochoride salt form... a friend mentioned he saw batches which started out looking like fishscale and turned into yellow waxy rocks in his pocket... I think the temp/pressure are factors in this way... if its initially colored yellowish it could be the heat for evap (if used) or impurities

I've finished sorting through the information that I've turned up on this subject and added it to the Jungle Spice document. I've pasted it below.






I.5 General Comments on "Colored Spice"







There has been a great deal of discussion and speculation on "yellow DMT" and "orange DMT", some of which has been reported to be subjectively different than ordinary white DMT. This turns out to be a rather thorny issue. There are several unrelated factors that can lead to yellow or orange spice; sometimes these colored spices are reported to be more potent than DMT, sometimes less potent. The discussion will be organized based on the reported origins of the colored crystals.





I.5.A Old Spice

Probably the simplest form of colored DMT comes samples that were originally pure white spice. As the samples age, they turn orange and waxy over time. There seems to be substantial disagreement over the amount of time necessary for this process to occur. Some people report a change in color become noticeable after several weeks to a month, while others have several month old samples that are still without discoloration. Anecdotal evidence indicates that higher temperatures speed this degradation process. It is unknown whether evironmental factors such as air moisture may play a role in the rate of degradation.

Since this orange spice forms from fresh spice when exposed to environmental conditions for a long period of time, it is tempting to label it a simple oxidation product. Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. We've already fingered a yellow oil as the most likely candidate for the simplest DMT oxidation product (DMT N-oxide). The orange color must come from something else, since a yellow oxidation product couldn't turn a translucent crystal orange. The simplest explanation that fits the available information is the following: When stored at room temperature for a long period of time, a small amount of the DMT begins oxidizing to DMT N-oxide. This small amount of DMT N-oxide is now also being exposed to environmental conditions for a long period of time, and begins breaking down into it's degradation product, which is either deep orange or red. This would mean that starting with a crystal that contains a trace amount of DMT N-oxide may be one of the factors that leads to a more rapid orange-ing of the spice. This explanation is consistent with observations that have been made on yellow oil; consider the following comments from El Ka Bong:



On the other hand, it's possible that the orange-red degradation product forms independent of the yellow oil; there isn't enough information to draw any hard conclusions (anyone want to run some TLCs of your old orange spice?). But to the people who are smoking it, the more important issue is what it does, not what it's made of. Combing through the scraps of anecdotal reports on the issue, there seems to be a general consensus: As the spice turns orange over time, it begins to be qualitatively "different" in terms of the experience (but not any less potent), then gradually the sample loses potency and becomes qualitatively unpleasant.





I.5.B Evaporated Spice

Another very common form of colored spice results from people evaporating their nonpolar solvent instead of freeze-precipitating. The yellow contained in spice that has been extracted with heptane or naphtha and collected by evaporation appears to just be trace impurities, most likely fats from the rootbark. It is reportedly harsher to smoke, but roughly the same potency as white spice. This yellow fraction (presumed to be plant fats and miscellaneous impurities) can be removed from the spice by recrystallization. There doesn't seem to be any indication that this sort of yellow spice has any biologically active chemicals besides DMT.

It appears that there is another form of yellow spice that can be obtained by evaporating off the solvent, depending on the evaporating conditions. People report a much yellower oily product when the solvent is evaporated with a fan, particularly with warmer temperatures. Others have obtained yellow crystals by melting off-white spice in an attempt to do a "solventless recrystallization". Yellow crystals obtained in this fashion are reported to be qualitatively different than plain spice, and more potent. Based on this information, it sounds like these methods are producing DMT which contains the yellow oil fraction I believe to be DMT N-oxide. Delafonze19 has reported happening on a method for reliably converting white DMT to the potent yellow oil (see Delafonze19's Preparation of Yellow Spice Oil.





I.5.C Alternate Solvents

Heptane and naphtha have not always been the solvents of choice in DMT extraction. Some of the older teks recommend ether, or dichloromethane (DCM). Xylene and toluene are also effective extraction solvents for pulling DMT, though we've seen they're less specific and pull other fractions. All have been reported to yield yellow or even orange spice. Considering the differences in the solvents, it will be easiest to consider them seperately.



Xylene and Toluene

Both of these solvents are known to pull a mixture of DMT and "jungle spice" when used on a nonpolar soup that's been exhausted od spice with an aliphatic hydrocarbon. It's therefor reasonable that they could be used as the primary extraction solvent to pull a similar mixture, but containing a great deal more DMT. One experimentor did just that:



Although we can't rule out the possibility that there may have been something idiosyncratic to the bark going on here, this report carries a strong recommendation for using xylene as an alternate extraction solvent if you're looking for some orange spice that apparently has something that the white spice lacks.



Ether

There have periodically been reports of using ether, or a binary solvent of ether/heptane (mostly ether), as an extraction solvent. This invariably leads to a product with yellow discoloration. Since the ether is evaporated to yield spice, it's not necessarily surprising that the product is yellow; we might expect some of the plant fats or other impurities to extract into the ether. On the other hand, ether/heptane (8:1) is known to extract a brown waxy compound as well as DMT, so it's quite possible that some of the yellow color in ether extracts is one of the "jungle spice" compounds.



Dichloromethane

This solvent is recommended by some of the older teks. Recent literature suggests that using DCM as a defatting solvent most likely allows for the formation of N-chloromethyltryptamine, a chemical of unknown pharmacology. It is unknown whether this compound might form when using DCM as an extraction solvent. Orange crystals that result from the use of DCM could have their for the same reason as the orange crystals extracted by xylene. As always, there's also the possibility that the coloration results from a pigment pulled by the DCM. But it's also possible that spice extracted with DCM could contain some quantity of N-chloromethyltryptamine. I was unable to turn up any reports on the qualitative effects of orange spice extracted with DCM.





I.5.D Odds and Ends

One last possible source of orange DMT could be the use of plant materials other than Mimosa root bark. For example many species of Acacia can yield an orange spice. While some of this color could indeed be plant fats, Acacias have been shown to have a richly diverse chemistry, so it seems entirely possible that some of this color could potentially come from an alkaloid fraction in the bark.

A few other comments on colored spices: I have seen two unrelated references to a "purple spice". One of these was accompanied by a blurry photograph which showed spice which was unmistakeably purple. I cannot concieve of this coloration having come from any of the compounds discussed above. Until some experiences come in with this material, I'd say it's probably best to recrystallize any such material you happen to run across.

I have also seen infequent references to "green spice". This is a mystery that I think I can put solidly to rest. It is only known to have been isolated by evaporating the solvent to collect the spice; further, it's only been reported in cases where the extractor used unsavory brands of naphtha (like Sunnyside). In at least one of these circumstances, the extractor evaporated a clean sample of their nonpolar solvent and discovered that it left a blue residue. Thus it appears that the green spice comes from yellow spice plus an blue non-volatile solvent-additive: yellow + blue = green. Long story short: avoid "green spice" like the plague.

Excellent work Entropymancer!
I swear just about every post of yours should be archived
keep up the good work

haha yea i guess i can get a bit anal about purity. i work in a field where pure compounds are sometimes a must and proving that things is pure is not always so easy. anyway i just think different colors just means you have different things other then DMT in your mix. what they are has been discussed in entropymancers post.

I've blown it off at@45 degrees or so with VM@P and yielded pure white huge!!! crystals! the higher the temp the more orange. this does'nt mean too much though, as ive been blown into the center with both! it seems the more NAOH you use on the first pull the merrier!