14 DAY TRIAL // Forget about the lies and the utopian images Christmas sweaters have been throwing at us for years now. The truth is that snowflakes don't always take the form of perfectly symmetrical hexagonal structures.
In fact, most of them are no more and no less than a bunch of frozen water vapors cuddled up together in hectic patterns. No, really, you need very specific temperatures and humidity levels to get gorgeously symmetrical snowflakes. Hence their being very rare.
As detailed in the video below, snowflakes form when temperatures are low enough for water vapors in the air above us to instantly freeze and turn into ice. The resulting crystals eventually get together and form snowflakes.
The very nature of water molecules explains why the crystals that birth snowflakes take a hexagonal shape. However, the shape of the snowflakes they form greatly depends on other factors such as temperature and humidity levels.
Specifically, researchers say that snowflakes take their final form not when they are created by ice crystals high up in the sky, but when exposed to various temperatures and humidity rates while en route to the ground.
This explains why, apart from the perfectly symmetrical ones that we hold so dear, flakes created by one and the same snowstorm actually look very different to one other.
