Dear Berthalia,

thanks for sharing this very interesting technical problem with the RG community. Yes, adding a few teaspoons of activated charcoal and boiling the mixture for a while should help. If necessary, the procedure can be repeated two or three times with new activated charcoal. This is a very common procedure in organic chemistry to decolorize dark solutions. You should give it a try.

In this context it might be interesting for you to know that activated charcoal can in turn be manufactured from mangosteen shells. For more information about this please have a look at the following interesting article:

On the preparation and characterization of activated carbon from mangosteen shell

Article On the preparation and characterization of activated carbon ...

Unfortunately the paper has not been posted as public full text on RG, but the Abstract already provides some initial information.

Good luck with your work and best wishes, Frank Edelmann

You can use activated charcoal to remove the pigment from the extract.

In addition to activated charcoal suggested by Kalyani and Frank, passing the extract through macroporous resin can also help to remove the colour.

Best wshes.