Illustrated · 1 min

In order for leaves to change color in the fall, the substances that give them their green color the rest of the year must participate in a chemical reaction to become new substances with a different color.
By Marshall Reyher - Own work, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Chemical reactions are often associated with experiments that happen in test tubes, but almost everything around you is the result of a chemical reaction.
Simply put, a chemical reaction is any process that changes one substance (chemical "thing") into another. This occurs when bonds form or are broken between different atoms. Bonds allow atoms of specific elements to join together to become many different substances. Therefore, everything around and inside you that isn't a singular element is the product, or end result, of a chemical reaction. The substances that react to form these products are called reactants.
Chemical reactions are typically depicted in the format , where the items before the arrow are the reactants, and the items the arrow is pointing to are the products. A reaction that can go back and forth is written as . In this case, A and B are the reactants of the "forward reaction" and the products of the "backwards reaction." We'll learn more when we study equilibrium
As you'll learn soon, bonds are formed to lower the energy of the participating atoms. Therefore, making bonds releases energy, and breaking bonds takes energy. Because of this, reactions usually either release or use energy. Reactions that release energy in the form of heat are called exothermic, while reactions that need energy, or lower the temperature of their surroundings, are called endothermic.

![Title: What is a chemical Reaction?
Text box: One or more substances (reactants) are changed chemically to form one or more new substances (products).
Reactants: oil, eggs, milk, sugar, flour [arrow right] Product: cake [arrow down] Cannot remove reactants from product.
Text box: One way to tell if a chemical reaction has occurred is to see if the original reactants can be recovered, unchanged.
Text box:](https://d20khd7ddkh5ls.cloudfront.net/chemical_reaction_basics_3.png)



