A clear soap bubble sits on snow. Then tiny feather-like shapes appear, drift and spread until the little sphere looks etched. ZALUSKArt’s Frozen Soap Bubbles turns a fragile everyday object into a close-up winter spectacle, with enough movement to reward a second viewing.
Watch Frozen Soap Bubbles on the creator’s Vimeo page. Published in January 2016, the film records a shoot the creator described as taking place at about −15°C. The accompanying note says only a small proportion of the bubbles survived long enough to film: a useful reminder that the finished sequence leaves out many popped bubbles.
The ice grows in the bubble’s film
A soap bubble encloses air inside a very thin liquid film. When that film freezes, the result is a delicate shell, not a solid ball of ice. That is why the structures can look so intricate while remaining extremely fragile.
A 2019 study in Nature Communications investigated this behaviour. In a uniformly cold environment, freezing releases heat locally and creates differences in surface tension. The resulting flow can carry ice crystals through the liquid film, producing a swirling “snow-globe” effect before the crystals grow together. The researchers also found a different pattern when only the supporting surface was cold and the surrounding room was warm.
What to watch on a second viewing
First follow one crystal instead of trying to take in the entire sphere. Then watch the boundary between transparent and patterned areas. The interesting part is the transition: little pieces of ice move and grow, rather than a complete design appearing all at once.
The dark background makes the pale branches easy to see, while the rim of the bubble keeps its round shape readable. Those are photographic choices as well as physical details. A bright, cluttered background would make the same freezing process much harder to follow.
A temperature in a film is not a universal recipe
The stated −15°C describes this shoot. Bubble solution, contact surface, wind and surrounding temperature all affect the outcome; it is not a promise that every bubble behaves the same way at one number. There is no need to introduce boiling water or extreme-cold stunts to enjoy the observation.
For the photographic side of the same creator’s work, browse the Warsaw frozen-bubble gallery. For a different material changing in the cold, see what happens to frozen flowers. The shared pleasure is in noticing a change too small or too brief to appreciate in a hurried glance.
For another photographer’s approach to the same delicate subject, see Chris Ratzlaff’s frozen bubbles in Calgary.
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