Water Marbles

Ingredients you already have in the kitchen!

Water marbles! Crazy how a few kitchen ingredients will make these. Weird, I can't wait to try. Science party?

Probably just regular glass marbles in this picture!

How to make "Water Marbles" from household ingredients - COOL science experiment!

Crazy how something that seems to be too good to be true usually is!

Water marbles! Crazy how a few kitchen ingredients will make these.

So.  Water marbles.  This is an extremely popular pin in many different incarnations.  And it's easy to see why - the photos are beautiful and the idea that you can make these yourself is intoxicating.  And unlike a lot of other pins that rely on people's optimism to fool them into belief, this pin has a YouTube video to back it up!

The hard truth is, this isn't real.  Someone went to a lot of time and effort to create a video (much like the glowing Mountain Dew hoax) to mislead people into believing you could cook up water marbles in your kitchen.

The water marbles you see in this video are really hydrogel beads - they start out as tiny bb-sized, hard pieces of superabsorbent polymer, and when you soak them in water, they absorb it and swell up to a squishy water ball.  You can even color them by adding colors to the water when you soak the beads.

I think the best part about this fake pin is that some of the pins go straight to ChemSpider's site, where Antony Williams handily debunks the whole thing.  People!  Pin responsibly!  Click through the pins you're adding to your boards to make sure they're legitimate.  You'll save yourself and countless others the heartbreak of attempting a really cool kitchen experiment like water beads, which was doomed to failure before it began.