section_path: Applications/Miscellanea
section_name: Miscellanea
paragraph_text: Miscellanea
  
  Pure silver metal is used as a food colouring. It has the E174 designation and is approved in the European Union. Traditional Indian and Pakistani dishes sometimes include decorative silver foil known as vark, and in various other cultures, silver dragée are used to decorate cakes, cookies, and other dessert items.
  
  Photochromic lenses include silver halides, so that ultraviolet light in natural daylight liberates metallic silver, darkening the lenses. The silver halides are reformed in lower light intensities. Colourless silver chloride films are used in radiation detectors. Zeolite sieves incorporating Ag ions are used to desalinate seawater during rescues, using silver ions to precipitate chloride as silver chloride. Silver is also used for its antibacterial properties for water sanitisation, but the application of this is limited by limits on silver consumption. Colloidal silver is similarly used to disinfect closed swimming pools; while it has the advantage of not giving off a smell like hypochlorite treatments do, colloidal silver is not effective enough for more contaminated open swimming pools. Small silver iodide crystals are used in cloud seeding to cause rain.
  
  The Texas Legislature designated silver the official precious metal of Texas in 2007.