About Our Reflective / Holographic / Psychedelic Chocolate

Psychedelic Chocolate - What’s the Trick?

First of all, there are no psychedelic compounds in this chocolate.  Like we said in our press release, it contains cacao, sugar, cocoa butter, and to make it a bona fide mushroom bar, some reishi organic mushroom powder. 

The magical way this bar reflects light is due to optics, and the way light behaves when it bounces off of certain surfaces. 

A Special Kind of Mold

When the chocolate cools and hardens, it takes the shape of whatever you poured it into.  That’s why chocolate bars come in all sorts of different shapes and sizes.  

But what if you pour that chocolate into an extraordinary mold with some extraordinary shapes?

Diffraction Grating

If you carve the right kind of shapes on the right kind of material, you can cause light to bounce off it in interesting ways.  That is basically what diffraction grating is, and it’s why this chocolate has iridescent properties.  

How did we etch the closely spaced narrow shapes needed to diffract light onto the surface of these chocolates? We didn’t!

You can purchase diffraction grating films on Amazon. They are available with many different patterns and price points.  And that’s what we did. The rainbow properties of this chocolate, especially noticeable under artificial light, are transferred directly from those diffraction films.  

Rainbow Chocolate - The Process

We poured the chocolate into some molds we had previously purchased to test and laid the film on the exposed side while still liquid and warm. When the chocolate hardened, the front took the shape of the mold, and the back took to the shape of the diffraction film. When the film was removed, the diffraction pattern was left behind - kind of like a fingerprint.

As long as the chocolate doesn’t melt, it will keep the reflecting light in that fun “psychedelic” way.

Tasty Experiments

One of the nice things about chocolate is that the results are edible — most of the time. This chocolate with reishi mushrooms has a nice tang with a nutty finish that I quite like.

While we may not make the iridescence a permanent feature (at least not with a mold designed to accommodate the diffraction sheet) we may have stumbled on a new flavor.

If you tried this chocolate, let us know what you think!