page_title: Bubble bath
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Bubble bath / History
caption_attribution_description: Local call number: JJS0711 Title: Ringling Circus clown Emmett Kelly in a bubble bath: Sarasota, Florida Date: ca. 1955 General note: Photo taken as a favor to Kelly, who wanted the image for his Christmas card. Joe's wife, Lois Foley Steinmetz, was crouched down out of sight behind the chair that held Kelly's clothing, with an egg beater in her hand. After every shot Joe took, Lois would leap out of hiding, use the egg beater to increase the foam in the tub, and conceal herself once again. Visit the Florida Memory blog to learn more about this photograph as told by Joe and Lois's daughter, Lois Duncan. Physical descrip: 1 photonegative - b&amp;w - 5 x 4 in. Series Title: Joseph Janney Steinmetz Collection Biography note: Joseph Janney Steinmetz was a world-renowned commercial photographer whose images appeared in such publications as the Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Time, Holiday, Collier's, and Town &amp; Country. His work has been referred to as "an American social history," which documented diverse scenes of American life from affluent northeasterners to middle-class Floridians. Steinmetz moved from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Sarasota, Florida in 1941. Repository: State Library and Archives of Florida, 500 S. Bronough St., Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250 USA. Contact: 850.245.6700. Archives@dos.myflorida.com Persistent URL: www.floridamemory.com/items/show/245740
context_page_description: A bubble bath is a filled bathtub with a layer of surfactant foam on the surface of the water and consequently also the surfactant product used to produce the foam. Less commonly, aerated or carbonated baths are called bubble baths.
  Bubbles on top of the water, less ambiguously known as a foam bath, can be obtained by adding a product containing foaming surfactants to water and temporarily aerating it by agitation. The practice is popular for personal bathing because of the belief that it cleanses the skin, that the foam insulates the bath water, keeping it warm for longer, and prevents or reduces deposits on the bath tub at and below the water level produced by soap and hard water. It can hide the body of the bather, preserving modesty or, in theatre and film, giving the appearance that a performer who is actually clothed is bathing normally. Children find foam baths particularly amusing, so they are an enticement to get them into the bathtub.
  Surfactant preparations for this purpose are themselves called "bath foam", "foaming bath", or "bubble bath", and frequently contain ingredients for additional purposes common to bath enhancers.
context_section_description: The earliest foam baths were foamed with soap, which practice came about shortly after soap flakes were marketed. Saponins were also used to foam machine-aerated baths. Foam baths became more popular with later surfactants; an early publicized use of an alkyl sulfate surfactant as bath foam was in the original 1936 production of the play The Women, but it is possible that a similar composition was used to produce foams seen in bath photos since the marketing of Dreft in 1933. Foam baths became standard practice for bathing children after the mass marketing of products so positioned in supermarkets during the 1960s and thereabouts, Bub  and Matey in the United States having been marketed shortly before 1960. the dubious claim had been made that their normal use (diluted in a tubful of water) would substitute for soap and/or rubbing to clean skin.
caption: Circus clown Emmett Kelly in a bubble bath, photographed by Joseph Janney Steinmetz
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