Snowflake Macro Photographer Confirms: No Two Are Alike, But Most Are Disappointing

Veteran snowflake macro photographer Nils Crystalline has published a retrospective analysis of his 15-year, 30,000-image career documenting individual snow crystals, concluding that while no two snowflakes are indeed alike, the vast majority are 'aesthetically substandard and frankly not worth the frostbite.' 'The public has been misled by the exceptional specimens,' Crystalline said from his cold studio in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he photographs snowflakes on a temperature-controlled glass slide using a modified Mitutoyo 10x metallurgical objective. 'Wilson Bentley published his most beautiful crystals. Instagram accounts show perfect hexagonal dendrites. What nobody tells you is that 97 percent of snowflakes are lumpy, asymmetrical, partially melted, or just boring.' Crystalline's data supports his assessment. Of 30,000 crystals photographed, only 912 — approximately 3 percent — exhibit the classic six-fold symmetric dendrite structure that appears in holiday decorations and stock photography. The remainder fall into categories Crystalline has labeled 'columns' (cylindrical and featureless), 'plates' (flat and uninteresting), 'needles' (essentially frozen toothpicks), and the largest category, which he labels 'blobs' (irregular aggregates of rime ice with no discernible structure). 'A blob is not a snowflake,' Crystalline said with evident frustration. 'It's frozen cloud water that fell on something. There's no branching, no symmetry, no crystallographic merit whatsoever. And they outnumber proper dendrites by about twenty to one.' Crystalline has proposed a quality rating system for snow crystals, ranging from F1 (perfect hexagonal dendrite) to F5 (amorphous ice aggregate, or 'blob'). He acknowledges the system has not been adopted by the meteorological community. 'They say all snow crystals are beautiful,' he said. 'That is not scientifically defensible. Some of them are ugly. I have the data.'