There are many varieties and uses of hematoxylin.  It has been in use for over a 160 years.  The perhaps best well-known is the use of the hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining procedure.  For those who do not already know, the H&E is a routine satin done as the first stain on all projects to understand the basic morphology of the tissue you’re looking at.  The hematoxylin in this stain is used to identify the nuclei of all types of tissues.  Hematoxylin can be used in two different methods.  There is the Progressive method, where the staining is done by creating a hematoxylin solution which has an excess of salts or acid.  This increases the selectivity for nuclei.  The regressive staining involves over staining of the tissues in a relatively neutral hematoxylin.  The slides are then brought through an acid wash, which takes off excess stain followed by an base wash to neutralize the the acid process.  This is more difficult than it looks and takes practice.  The hematoxylin recipes here are most of the most common ones used although most labs tend to buy pre-made kits.  Our company makes the Weigert’s hematoxylin from scratch but choose to buy the Harris hematoxylin.  This is because, the mercuric chloride used to make Harris hematoxylin is not now available in the US otherwise we would make it.

We now have a hematoxylin page.  Here you can see and download all the most used hematoxylin recipes.

http://histologistics.com/histology/6-recipes-for-hematoxylin/