Are there any food safe fluorescent dyes?
The easiest one to obtain is turmeric, which is slightly fluorescent due the the curcumin in it. It’s not very flavorful, and it’s mostly used for color. It’s yellow and it glows an orangey-yellow under UV light. Add enough sugar to it and it should make an interesting taste. Quinine and caffeine are both fluorescent. (I discovered the former while sipping a gin-and-tonic at a black-light lit club). They’re both intensely bitter, though. The quinine glows a kind of purple; I’m not sure about the caffeine (but you wouldn’t want to use it for children anyway). Riboflavin is orange, and glows yellow-green. You can find it in health-food stores. I just had a whole bunch of it; it’s a byproduct of making cheese, which I did over the weekend. Finally, there’s sodium fluorescein, which glows bright blue. It’s also called uranine, and it’s available from chemical supply houses. (It’s commonly used in many forms of radiology; they inject it into you and record the glow.
