Make Rainbow Clouds at Home

Materials you'll need

• Water
• Clear glass
• Shaving cream
• Food coloring (multiple colors)
• Small cups or containers (one per color)
• Dropper or pipette

 

Step-by-step tutorial

Step 1: Fill your glass about ¾ of the way full with water.

Step 2: Spray a layer of shaving cream on top of the water to fill the remaining ¼ of the glass. This is your cloud!

Step 3: In separate small cups, mix a few drops of food coloring with a little water. Add one color per cup. Then use a dropper to squeeze each color onto the top of the shaving cream. Use as many colors as you like!

Step 4: Watch and wait! The colors will slowly push through the shaving cream and rain down into the water below in colorful streaks.

Learn more

This experiment is a model of how rain actually works! The shaving cream acts like a cloud, and the colored water acts like raindrops. As you add more and more colored water, the shaving cream "cloud" gets heavier and heavier — and eventually it can't hold on anymore. When that happens, the color pushes through and falls into the water below, just like precipitation falls from the sky. Real clouds work in a similar way: tiny water droplets collect inside until the cloud gets so full and heavy that gravity pulls them down to Earth as rain.