Investigating Color in My Chemistry Lab

[goku]

in my chemistry lab we had a kind of color test.
the thing was supposed to come as blue according to the lab manual. . It did not. to me there was no color.however my teachers forced me to believe what i was looking at was blue,supposedly "it is very faint". that was not mentioned in the manual.

but colors means wavelengths right.
so can we use a colorimeter or anything to get some kind of data in wavelength suggesting this can not be blue.

is there any other way? i don't really know what the compound we r looking at.

 

[chemisttree]

The color is more apparent the longer the path length of the sample. Try to orient the sample so that you are looking through the thickest part of the solution. In a test tube, this would be looking down the open top rather than from the side.

If you have a spectrometer, you can look at the absorbance spectrum. A blue solution will absorb strongly in the red and yellow portion of the spectrum.