While fireworks have been around for a while, they’ve come a long way from the simple bangs and pops of old. Nowadays, you can see fireworks that change color, shoot out sparks, or even look like giant fireballs. But what gives fireworks their different colors?
Red
Red fireworks are generally made with a chemical called strontium nitrate. This chemical is similar to sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate, which are both used in ordinary explosives. It’s also used in some fertilizers, but it’s much purer when it’s used in fireworks—it doesn’t have any other elements mixed in. Strontium nitrate burns at a very high temperature, which makes it great for red explosions.
Yellow
To make yellow fireworks, you need to use sodium nitrate—the same stuff that’s found in ordinary explosives. Sodium burns at an even more extreme temperature than strontium nitrate does. When sodium burns, it jumps off into the air as a gas before burning up completely. The yellow bursts you see from sodium-based fireworks are actually the final stages of this process—in the beginning of a firework explosion, the sodium is already gone by the time you see it.
Green
If you’ve ever wondered what makes fireworks come in different colors, the answer is both simpler and more complex than you might think. For most fireworks, the color of the firework isn’t just one ingredient—it’s a mixture. Most fireworks use a mixture of three ingredients to create the desired color: a flash powder (which provides the initial burst of light), a coloring agent (to create the desired color), and a fuel source (to help burn the coloring agent).
Red colored fireworks typically include strontium carbonate or lithium carbonate as their coloring agent and black powder as their fuel. For yellow fireworks, it’s sodium nitrate that gives them their color, while green fireworks are made with barium nitrate. If you see pink or white fireworks, they’re probably using something called titanium tetrachloride or magnesium to get those colors.
There are also rarer types of fireworks that use colored metals to create their flashes, like copper for blue or gold for red-orange. But when it comes to standard pyrotechnic displays, it’s mostly just variations on a theme! When we think of fireworks, we almost always see them as bursts of red, yellow, green, and sparkly white. But what makes the colors in fireworks different?
Fireworks are made up of a cocktail of chemicals that can be adjusted to create just about any color you want. To make red fireworks, for example, manufacturers use a compound called lithium carbonate (or “Li2CO3”). This compound reacts with aluminum powder to create a burst of bright-red sparks when it’s ignited.
- To make yellow fireworks, manufacturers use sodium nitrate (or “NaNO3”). When this compound is combined with an oxidizing agent like potassium nitrate (KNO3), a reaction occurs that produces a burst of bright-yellow sparks.
- To create green fireworks, manufacturers combine barium chlorate or barium perchlorate with powdered metals like copper or strontium. The resulting chemical reaction produces a bright-green flash when it’s ignited.
- To create pink fireworks, manufacturers combine strontium carbonate with small amounts of copper chloride to produce a burst of bright-pink sparks when it’s ignited.
- White sparks can be produced by combining magnesium powder and aluminum powder.
We love fireworks. Whether we’re watching them go off in celebration of the 4th of July, or we’re watching them at a Disney World parade, we can’t help but feel like our summer is missing something if there aren’t any fireworks involved. But have you ever wondered why firework colors are the way they are? What makes those colors happen?
Well, it’s all thanks to some pretty cool science. Here are a few of the colors of the most common fireworks—red, yellow, green, and pink/white—and how they get their color:
Red fireworks: A combination of strontium carbonate and aluminum
Yellow fireworks: Strontium nitrate and aluminum
Green fireworks: A combination of barium nitrate and chlorinated copper
Pink/white fireworks: Strontium perchlorate
There’s nothing quite like the oohs and aahs of fireworks lighting up the sky. But have you ever wondered how they get those colors into the air? We have! So we looked into it and, man, is it cool.
The first thing to know about fireworks is that their “stars” are actually pellets or grains of compressed black powder (also known as gunpowder) called a pyrotechnic composition. These stars are held in place at the base of a firework shell by clay or wax, and when the shell explodes, they shoot out in all directions.
Each star that comes out of a firework shell contains a number of chemicals that will react together to produce different colors once they’re ignited. For example, strontium nitrate gives fireworks a bright red color; calcium chloride produces an orange color; sodium nitrate makes fireworks yellow; barium chloride makes green fireworks; copper chloride makes blue ones; and lithium carbonate produces pink or white colors.
How those colors appear depends on how the chemicals react once they’re ignited. For example, strontium carbonate burns red because it creates light energy at 615 nanometers (nm), which is right in the range of human eyes’ sensitivity to color—essentially
Fireworks are a staple of the summer season. They’re also one of the best parts of any Fourth of July celebration, no matter where you live. But have you ever stopped to wonder about just how fireworks work? What makes them so bright? How does that loud boom happen? And what gives them their different colors, anyway?
We did some research to find out The Science Behind Fireworks. Here’s what we discovered:
The next time you’re at a fireworks show, look around to see if you can catch a glimpse of the explosives that are being launched into the air. Chances are, they’ll all be red in color. These explosives are called pyrotechnics and come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they’re all made using a combination of chemicals (which we’ll get to in a minute) that burn when ignited by fire.
If you were to ask someone who works on the pyrotechnics crew at your local fireworks show why the fireworks all look red, you’d probably hear them say that it’s because the pyrotechnics are made with nitrates or other chemicals that turn into nitrogen oxide when heated up by fire. That’s true, but not the whole story.
There’s actually one more chemical in there: iron oxide (or rust). This chemical is what gives fireworks their yellow tint. When iron oxide burns, it creates an orange-red color that appears as either pink or white depending on how much heat is applied to it. Now let’s get back to those other chemicals we mentioned earlier—nitrates and other chemicals that turn into nitrogen oxide when heated up by fire—because they play an important role here too.