Simon's Reagent Color Chart: MDMA vs MDA Results

MDMA turns Simon’s blue. MDA either does not react at all or turns a muddy gray-green.

Simon’s is the one reagent in a standard kit that separates those two, which is why a single-bottle kit is never enough. It splits methamphetamine from amphetamine the same way. What it cannot do is name your sample on its own, tell you anything about dose or purity, or find fentanyl.

The chart

Colors follow DanceSafe’s Expected Reactions Color Chart, version 17. Judge the color inside the first 45 to 60 seconds, before the slow drift every reagent shows.

Blue means a secondary amine

Simon’s is two solutions. Bottle A is sodium nitroprusside with acetaldehyde in water. Bottle B is sodium carbonate in water. Both go onto the same grain, and together they detect secondary amines. Blue is the signal that one is present.

That single fact explains the whole chart. MDMA carries an N-methyl group on its nitrogen, making it a secondary amine, so it goes blue. MDA lacks that methyl group, making it a primary amine, so it does not. The same structural difference sits between methamphetamine, which goes blue, and amphetamine, which does nothing.

Here is the catch. “Secondary amine” is a category, not an identity. Mephedrone, PMMA, and the MAPB compounds are all secondary amines and all turn blue. A blue result tells you something about the structure of whatever is dominant in your sample. It does not name the molecule.

So the reagents get read as a set, across one row:

• Marquis purple-to-black plus Simon’s blue is consistent with MDMA.
• Marquis orange-to-brown plus Simon’s blue is consistent with methamphetamine, not MDMA.
• Marquis purple-to-black plus no reaction or gray-green is consistent with MDA.
• Nothing on Marquis plus blue on Simon’s is a red flag, pointing toward something like a cathinone.

If your reactions do not all land on one row, the result is unexpected and the sample should be treated as unknown.

MDA is not a milder MDMA

It runs roughly 8 to 12 hours against 4 to 6 for MDMA, it is more visual and hallucinogenic, and animal research points to greater neurotoxic potential at comparable doses. Someone who redoses on the assumption they took MDMA can end up hours deeper into an experience they did not plan for. The full comparison is in MDA vs MDMA.

Marquis cannot make this call. MDMA and MDA both turn it purple to black, and both go near-black on Mecke and Froehde. Simon’s is the only reagent in a standard kit that resolves the two, which is why every serious MDMA workflow includes it.

Running it

1. Fresh sample. Do not drip Simon’s into a spent Marquis reaction. Crush a new pinhead-sized grain onto clean white ceramic or hard plastic.
2. One drop of A, then one drop of B, on that same grain. Splitting the two bottles across two samples is the most common Simon’s error there is. Do not touch either dropper to the sample, and never put a cap back on the wrong bottle.
3. Read within the first minute, in white daylight or under a white LED. Not a phone screen, not colored bar lighting.
4. Run a blank alongside it. A drop of A and B on bare plate shows you the reagent’s own color, so you do not read that as a reaction.
5. Compare against Marquis on a separate grain before concluding anything. Simon’s answers half the question.
6. Neutralize with baking soda, wash with soap and water, dry thoroughly before the next test.

Where people get this wrong

Blue is a narrowing, not a confirmation. It moves you from “some powder” to “something with a secondary amine in it,” and that is genuinely useful, but only next to a Marquis result.

Expecting MDA to do nothing every time is the other frequent misread. DanceSafe added the muddy gray-green reaction after it started showing up around 2021, and lists both outcomes as expected for an MDA-like substance. A dark murky result is not automatically a spoiled test.

Heavily dyed pressed pills tint the reaction, and a colored binder can push a weak result out of readable range. Test grains from more than one spot. Reading late, or in bar lighting, does the same thing: it moves a real result outside the range printed on the chart.

And blue does not mean safe. It says nothing about how much MDMA is in the pill, nothing about what else is in there with it, and nothing about fentanyl.

What Simon’s cannot see

No reagent detects fentanyl, so run a fentanyl test strip whatever the colors show. Dissolve the sample first, 1 teaspoon (5 mL) of water per 10 mg, or 2 teaspoons (10 mL) for MDMA and methamphetamine, since those two cause false positives at higher concentrations. Then dip. One line is POSITIVE. Two lines is NEGATIVE. A faint second line still counts as a second line. Strips are here.

For the third reagent, DanceSafe’s current MDMA instructions use Froehde, and both MDMA and MDA turn it a blue-tinted black. Mecke behaves much the same way. Start with how to read a Marquis result, because that is what gives Simon’s its context.

Reagents identify the presence of a substance class. They do not establish purity, they do not establish dose, they cannot tell you whether more than one drug is in the sample, and they cannot rule out fentanyl. Only a strip or a laboratory does that last part. For the full workflow see how to test your MDMA, and for dosing, our MDMA harm reduction guide.

Color data: DanceSafe Expected Reactions Color Chart, v17 | DanceSafe reagent reaction updates