Balloon

• Evenly mix the pepper and salt. Blow up a balloon and rub the balloon on a wool shirt or your hair. A negative charge will build up on the surface of the balloon. Hold the balloon an inch above the mixture and watch as the pepper particles leap onto the balloon. Do not get the balloon too close to the mixture, salt will also attach to the balloon if held too close as both salt and pepper are positively charged.
  
  

Sink or Swim

• Mix together the salt and pepper and place on a piece of paper. Get a glass of water. Take the salt and pepper and carefully add the items onto the water. Bend the paper like a filter to control the flow of the particles into the water. If this is done carefully, the pepper particles will float on top of the water and the salt particles will sink to the bottom of the glass. Take a skimmer to remove the pepper.
  
  

Dissolve

• Create a mixture of salt and pepper and place into the bottom of a glass. Pour warm water over the mixture and stir. The salt will dissolve in the water, leaving the pepper particles floating the in the water. Skim out the pepper particles. This process is not as reliable as the sink-and-swim method because once the salt is dissolved, particles may attach to the pepper, which will appear after the water evaporates.
  
  

Petri Dish

• The petri dish experiment is similar to the balloon as it uses static electricity to attract the pepper particles. Petri dishes typically are round shallow dishes found in labs and science classes. Select shallow dishes with plastic lids. Place the mixture of salt and pepper in the bottom of the dish and shut the lid tight. Take a piece of wool, the closer to 100 percent wool the better, and begin rubbing on the lid. A charge will form and will draw the pepper particles to the lid. This experiment demonstrates that as rubbing continues, the larger the charge and more particles it will attract.