The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles

"I'd been avoiding it because I knew they'd get excited and want to do it," Kehoe says. "And I didn't know that I could." In eight years of intermittent experiments, he had created bubbles in dozens of colors, with dozens of dyes, yet never one that was washable enough to sell. "You're asking for magic," Kehoe says. "I tried to talk them out of it, but they were adamant. I knew sheer money or manpower still might not do it, and how could I let them down?"

But that Friday his business partner Guy Haddleton, the one who signed
the checks, told him to bring the bubbles in on Monday morning. So Kehoe pulled out the old pots and powders and set about destroying Sherri's new marble countertops.

"And I couldn't get it," he says. "All
Friday night, into Saturday morning, I'm trying everything I thought I did before, and all I'm seeing is clear bubbles." He now suspects that Proctor & Gamble changed some small ingredient in its dish soap that caused it to react differently. "I really panicked. I went to the store and tried every soap I could find. Nothing worked."

If he couldn't fix it with soap, he had to find a new dye. "I cleaned out stores of any products with color. The clerks thought I was nuts. I spent hundreds of dollars buying one of everything. One store had these specialty inks that were $30 a bottle that I had never tried. So I raced home and started mixing-failure after failure. I freaked out, wondering how I would explain to Guy that his money may have been better invested on the 100-to-1 pony in the eighth race at Del Mar.

"Then one of the inks worked. It made the most wonderful colored bubbles I had ever seen. And they washed off my skin without scrubbing. I had never tried it because it was a pigment-based product, and I gave up on pigments years ago [because they tend to stain more than dyes]. But these behaved more like dyes and were skin-washable." Kehoe and Sherri dumped the solution on their clothes and kids, and every time it washed out. When Haddleton saw the bubbles on Monday, he was thrilled.