An interactive chemistry experiment for 3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid serums stabilised with natural antioxidants — rose water, aloe vera gel, and lemon juice. Set the temperature, the light, the weeks — and watch the serum degrade in real time.
Choose a formula and storage condition. The vial, gauge, and parameters respond live.
Scroll to age the lead formula (F8) through a Qatar-summer worst case — 40 °C, light + open air.
Stability Index over 12 weeks at the condition selected in the chamber above.
Enter your own lab observations and compute the weighted SI instantly.
All contain 2% 3-OEA, pH 5.0 ± 0.2, 50 mL batch. Antioxidants are % w/v.
The mechanism behind the colour change you just simulated.
3-O-ethyl ascorbic acid caps the C-3 hydroxyl — the spot where ordinary vitamin C is attacked first — with an ethyl ether. It stays water-soluble and converts to active vitamin C in the skin.
Heat, light, oxygen and trace metals strip electrons from the molecule, forming reactive oxygen species. The ring opens and hydrolyses into yellow-brown products — the colour shift you see in the vial.
Phenolics in rose water, the oxygen-barrier polysaccharides of aloe gel, and the low-pH chelating environment from lemon juice intercept those radicals — sparing the 3-OEA and slowing the browning.
Interactive simulation is an established way to teach scientific reasoning: a reader who can change variables and watch the outcome builds intuition that static text cannot give. This page follows that tradition — letting students vary temperature, light, and time to explore reaction kinetics first-hand before running the real 12-week study.
Further reading — Bret Victor, Explorable Explanations (2011) · Distill, Communicating with Interactive Articles (2020) · PhET, Reversible Reactions (Arrhenius-based interactive kinetics).
The peer-reviewed and industry sources behind the oxidation model and protection factors.
Entries tagged ⚠ Verify source are industrial or secondary and could not be independently confirmed — including some quantitative claims (the ~11.22 kJ/mol activation energy and several exact %-retention figures). Confirm each against the primary source, then correct or remove before judging. Peer-reviewed entries (1, 5, 7) are not flagged.
Full citations are listed in the project's standalone Scientific Brief. Reported retention/efficiency figures are as stated by each source and, where flagged, await primary-source confirmation.