A Home Chemist Chased Liesegang Rings and Got a Cloudy Gel Instead
Liesegang rings form in gels at spacings that follow a geometric series, and their underlying mechanism still isn't fully resolved. After rejecting carcinogenic potassium dichromate and fume-heavy ammonia, I tried a safer recipe from a 1999 Chopard paper: agar jelly, magnesium chloride, and sodium hydroxide. The hardest part was dissolving the agar without clouding it; a microwave at 900W for 40 seconds beat my magnetic stirrer. Ten hours later I had a white precipitate interface but no bands.
Embarassingly the fiddliest part of all this was trying to get the agar jelly nice and smooth so that the gel wouldn't be cloudy, so that I could see the banding.