The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles

Chemical burns, ruined clothes, 11 years, half a million dollars—it’s not easy to improve the world’s most popular toy. Yet the success of one inventor’s quest to dye a simple soap bubble may change the way the world uses color.

“This is the most difficult project I have ever worked on,” Sabnis (their chemist) says now. “You think it’s easy. Why could someone not make it? But when you actually do it, it’s just impossible.” For months, he ran 60 to 100 experiments a week, filling notebooks with sketches of molecules, spending weekends in the library studying surfactant chemistry, trying one class of dyes after another…

The PopSci article is from 2005, but it’s a good read.