| abstract
| - Glycerine, also known as glycerin and glycerol, (see Wikipedia article: ) is a liquid widely reputed to be a critical bubble juice ingredient. While it can be useful in some cases, it is not nearly as useful as people generally believe. Even within the bubbling community, its value is often overstated. That is not to say that it isn't sometimes useful, but its influence on MOST recipes is much smaller than people imagine. In the majority of glycerine-containing recipes that we have found, blind tests have indicated that removing the glycerine does not have a noticeable effect though there are (see below) cases where the glycerine is critical. People often have the impression that glycerine will turn detergent and water into a professional-quality and friendly bubble juice with which it is easy to blow bubbles. That is generally not the case. A is usually needed to turn water and detergent into a bubble-friendly mix. Another common misconception is that a small amount of glycerine will make bubbles strong and long-lasting. Small amounts of glycerine have little to no impact on bubble longevity or strength. Substantial amounts may influence the longevity of smallish bubbles (particularly indoors). These claims might have been true in the early 1970s when dishwashing liquid-based recipes were first circulated but even that is not certain. At that time, detergent formulations were different than they are now in 2013. With some exceptions discussed below, adding glycerine to a mix will not profoundly improve it. Glycerine has many interesting chemical properties, but those properties generally do not come into play with most recipes that you find. Even when glycerine can have a beneficial impact, it generally requires much more than most recipes call for. Those benefits are often more effectively achieved by other means, such as refining the dilution or adjusting the pH (with baking powder or baking soda+citric acid or other means). While many bubble juice recipes found on the internet call for detergent, water and glycerine as the sole ingredients, anyone advocating those recipes either does not want people to know the secret of high-quality bubble juice OR has not tried making bubble juice using detergent, water, and an appropriate polymer. Bubble-friendliness. Bubble-friendliness is what we call a juice's potential for easy-to-blow bubbles. With bubble-friendly bubble juice, it is easy to blow many bubbles with a dip of a small plastic wand. This tendency is strongly correlated with the ease that bubbles can be closed with tri-string wands. With the exception of solutions that have little or no water, glycerine tends to have no impact on bubble-friendliness. Getting just a bubble or two from a dip is a challenge with such recipes, whereas getting many bubbles per dip is easy with water, detergent, and the right amount of an appropriate polymer. Longevity. Glycerine may, when used in sufficiently large quantities, increase the longevity of small bubbles (such as those blown from dimestore bubble wands and used for bubble sculpture) indoors. This effect requires a significant amount of glycerine (on the order of 10%-30% of the solution by weight). The exact amount will depend on a number of factors. The effect is generally not noticeable with larger bubbles especially outdoors. Even very large amounts of glycerine do not protect medium-sized bubbles and larger against dehydration outside in low humidity. Adjusting dilution and the pH have much bigger impacts than adding glycerine. One bubble sculptor explained it this way, "I use a fair amount of glycerine in my mix for bubble sculpture. It may not extend the lifetime very much, but for me a few seconds is the difference between completing a complex sculpture and failure. Getting a few seconds is important to me in that situation. But I stopped using it for big bubbles." The greatest benefit seems to be to what we would call static bubbles, bubbles that don't move around much, such as those created with the Longevity Test. Even then a considerable amount of glycerine needs to be used for the difference to be significant. Bubble-friendly glycerine mixes. While glycerine does not noticeably improve bubble-friendliness in typical detergent/water mixes, it can be a critical ingredient in some recipes that have little or no water. These mixes are generally used for blowing small or even tiny bubbles. You can get streams of easy-to-blow bubbles with a dip of a small plastic wand with these mixes. However, if you water the solutions down, they quickly lose their bubble-friendliness. Two example are:
* Recipes#A_Simple_Recipe_That_Creates_a_Lot_of_Bubbles_with_Small_Wands
* this Dawn Direct Foam-based recipe that I blogged that is great for micro-wands, too.
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