Welcome to soap bubbles shop!

We have a wide variety of soap bubbles items for you:

Gazillion Bubbles
Soap Bubbles Books
Sports & Outdoors
Soap Bubbles For Baby
Soap Bubbles Beauty
Toys & Games
Health & Personal Care

Sit back, relax and shop at your own pace in the comfort of your own home. No more running all over town looking for just what you want. We will be constantly adding products to update our store, so be sure to come back often. Of course, customer service and satisfaction is of utmost importance to us, so be sure to give us your comments, and tell a friend about the great new store you've found. Frequent shoppers will be given a discount, so be sure to shop often!

Soap bubble

Useful information about soap bubbles

A soap bubble is a very thin film of soap water that forms a sphere with an iridescent surface. Soap bubbles usually last for only a few moments and then burst either on their own or on contact with another object. They are often used as a children's plaything, but their usage in artistic performances shows that they can be fascinating for adults too. Soap bubbles can help to solve complex mathematical problems of space, as they will always find the smallest surface area between points or edges.

Surface tension and shape

Soap bubbles, Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, 2nd third of 18th century.

A bubble can exist because the surface layer of a liquid (usually water) has a certain surface tension, which causes the layer to behave somewhat like an elastic sheet. However, a bubble made with a pure liquid alone is not stable and a dissolved surfactant such as soap is needed to stabilize a bubble. A common misconception is that soap increases the water's surface tension. Actually soap does the exact opposite, decreasing it to approximately one third the surface tension of pure water. Soap does not strengthen bubbles, it stabilizes them, via an action known as the Marangoni effect. As the soap film stretches, the surface concentration of soap decreases, which causes the surface tension to increase. Thus, soap selectively strengthens the weakest parts of the bubble and tends to prevent them from stretching further. In addition, the soap reduces evaporation so the bubbles last longer, although this effect is relatively small.

Their spherical shape is also caused by surface tension. The tension causes the bubble to form a sphere, as a sphere has the smallest possible surface area for a given volume. This shape can be visibly distorted by air currents, and hence by blowing. If a bubble is left to sink in still air, however, it remains very nearly spherical, more so for example than the typical cartoon depiction of a raindrop. When a sinking body has reached its terminal velocity, the drag force acting on it is equal to its weight, and since a bubble's weight is much smaller in relation to its size than a raindrop's, its shape is distorted much less. (The surface tension opposing the distortion is similar in the two cases: The soap reduces the water's surface tension to approximately one third, but it is effectively doubled since the film has an inner and an outer surface.)