First of all, it has to be made from scratch.

15 January 2025

To grow a perfect snowflake you start with a cracking-cold windless day or night, although nights like this may be hard to find near you.

You get a light shower of water vapor falling, from high up, in drops so tiny they’re probably invisible. You let the geometry of water do its work as the bit of vapor drifts downward through the cold, crystallizing into a six-sided, or possibly twelve-sided, but never eight- or four-sided water cookie — impossibly light and fine, made from scratch and like no other.

To get a symmetrical, perfectly formed one you must somehow keep it from bashing into other falling flakes as it forms and prevent it from clinging to its neighbors. And to have a chance to look at it you’d better plan to catch it on something that won’t melt it.

This doesn’t happen often. But if it does, you might find that ten minutes later your mitten or glove holds a snowflake that rivals the photos of Wilson Bentley (1865-1931), a resident of Vermont who made a lifetime pursuit out of capturing snowflakes on black velvet in order to shoot their portraits in the freezing cold, quick! before they could melt.

You can see his photos at Wilson Bentley, in Wikipedia. And if you’d like to know more snowflake lore, take a look at Kenneth Libbrecht’s book Snowflakes.