Mercury + sulfur = vermilion, a stunning red pigment 

I second this. Ppe is vital! Gloves, goggles and coat! Especially with mercury! Plus look up how to dispose of these compounds

Mercury metal does not easily pass through intact skin, and it is perfectly safe to touch without gloves. Even if it did it would be very poorly absorbed as it's not much water soluble, nor really soluble in apolar solvents. Mercury sulfide is virtually completely insoluble in water, it has very low bioavailability and it is possibly the least toxic compound of mercury. It has been used as a pigment for centuries without much issue. The maximum allowed concentrations by law of mercury sulfide reported in the literature are so low only by analogy with other mercury II compounds and do not reflect any available pharmacotoxicological literature, as this is virtually non-existent. The only skin contact hazard I really see here is the potassium hydroxide which is highly caustic and corrosive, but still, it won't do much if you wash it off promptly. Don't get me wrong, gloves are important, but knowing what you are working with is much more important than gloves. Especially when there's people who use chemically incompatible gloves and/or don't change them after a spill of something dangerous by skin contact that will pass through them.

Awesome effort

At what temperature you heat the reaction?

Mercury is never safe in any form. Trust that. It can put u in hospital bed for 20 years, even throughlatex.

@@elirevzen418 I looked into it and found two patents I could scale down (industrial processes, processing 1000s of pounds at a time) and try one or both out. What do you want Cu2O for?

Is there a reason that you don't like the many other youtube videos posted on that exact subject? I haven't watched them, as for me, KNO3 is easily cheaply bought. Maybe you haven't looked into it on youtube and have only searched for literature sources - regardless, if the other videos aren't satisfactory for your purposes, I could head to my local hardware store, buy a 25lb bag of "Chick N Poo™," which is apparently 100% chicken manure compost, and start working on something. Also, when you say black gold, what exactly do you mean?

@@sudhakarsudhakar1399 do you mean something to neutralize white phosphorus burns/exposure?

@@napalmholocaust9093 not sure, haven’t made a paint out of it yet. From what I’ve read about it and using this method to make it, it shouldn’t fade in sunlight. The presence of chloride is detrimental to how lightfast and generally stable it is, so using distilled water is necessary

It doesn't melt, it either sublimes and/or decomposes back into mercury and sulfur

It's a simple neutralization reaction, you react aqueous ammonia with hydroiodic acid. I needed some several years ago, and I made it by using a slight excess of ammonia solution, boiling it to dryness, and washing it with ethanol then filtering 3 times. After each ethanol wash and filtration, I pulled a vacuum on the product for 24h. Wrapping the flask containing the NH4I in aluminum foil is preferred because it's light sensitive. If that's an insufficient writeup, let me know, and I'll start working on a video shortly. I'm a visual learner, so I understand if a textual description isn't enough