Video: Six-sided snowflakes bloom in slow motion

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake – but these are. Film-maker Vyacheslav Ivanov used a high-speed camera to record these individual snowflakes subliming away – then reversed the direction of the video to make them appear to be blooming into chilly flowers.

Ivanov’s snowflakes originally formed stars with six-fold symmetry because water molecules join together into hexagon shapes as they freeze. Starting with a small crystal, more and more molecules attach to the sides of the hexagon, and it grows in six directions. Each arm of the snowflake closely matches the others because they form in near-identical conditions.

Don’t be fooled by this perfection, however, as snowflakes that fall from the sky are often much messier clumps of ice. Perfect six-siders form at about -15 °C, with low cloud and no wind, according to research by Ken Libbrecht of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who is also a snowflake photographer.