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Can Carnations Be Dyed?

Carnations are ideal flowers for adding color with dye because of the way they take in water and distribute it to the edges of the petals. By putting food coloring in the flower's water, the dye will find its way up the stem and into the petals of the flower itself. You can add color to a carnation to make it more appropriate for a seasonal holiday, to match the flower to a party color scheme or to perform a scientific experiment to show how water makes its way through a flower.

Techniques for Dying Carnations
- To dye a carnation, cut off the end of the stem so that it can easily take in water. Add 20 or 30 drops of food coloring to a glass of water, and then place the flower in the glass. In approximately two hours, you'll start to see color in the petals of the carnation. A twist on this experiment is to cut the stem in half, then put each half in a glass of water filled with a different color of dye.
Why Dye Carnations?
- A white carnation is an ideal flower for dying, because of the way the flower holds water in its petals, and because the white color allows the food color to really show through. Other flowers that make good canvasses for dying include Queen Anne's lace and daisies. You may choose to dye carnations to color the flower for a certain holiday -- green for St. Patrick's Day, for example, or orange or black for Halloween.
How it Works
- Putting food color in a carnation's water is a good way to illustrate the process of how flowers take in hydration, a process known as "transpiration." The water held in the leaves and petals leaves the flower by evaporation, which then creates a vacuum effect that draws water up through the stem. Dying a flower does not harm it in any way.
Floral Paint
- Florists color carnations using floral paint, rather than the food-dye technique. There are two main reasons for this: By using paint, the florist has a greater variety of color options available, and the florist can color the flower with more than one shade. For carnations, the more open the flower, the more effective the painting process.

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