Soap bubble for its soaps in 1886 using a painting by John Everett Millais of a child playing with bubbles. The Chicago company Chemtoy began selling bubble solution in the 1940s, and bubble solution has been popular with children ever since. According to one industry estimate, retailers sell around 200 million bottles annually. A bubble is made of transparent water enclosing transparent air. However the soap film is as thin as the visible light wavelength, resulting in interferences. This creates iridescence which, together with the bubble's spherical shape and fragility, contributes to its magical effect on children and adults alike. Each colour
Isabella (Millais painting) violently kicks a frightened dog while cracking a nut. Millais and his colleague William Holman Hunt had both produced drawings illustrating episodes from the poem, but only Millais worked his up into a full painting (Hunt's 1868 "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" used a completely different composition). Both drawings used distorted perspective and angular poses characteristic of medieval art, by which the Pre-Raphaelites were influenced. Millais also draws on the precedent of William Hogarth's satirical depictions of an arranged marriage "Marriage à-la-mode". The painting is structured with deliberately distorted perspective, elongating the right hand side of the table and