Fake Snow? It’s Spray-On Beef Fat
By Michael Frank, Adventure Journal on December 26th, 2011
We love Wired’s what’s in it column, because it’s always breaking down household products (Colgate toothpaste, say) and grossing us out with their toxicity. Here we have fake snow, a common celebratory ingredient of any festive holiday in Phoenix…and increasingly, Xmas in the rest of the nation, too. What we learn about the fake fluff vs. real pow is that it takes lots of fat to seem both snowlike in appearance and white. What KIND of fat? Both vegetable and animal. And then there’s glue, too, so you can spray your canned fat onto a just-cut spruce and have it stick. Of course it wouldn’t be a holiday without some highly flammable, and toxic-if-inhaled solvents, some salt to make the faux flakes sparkle, and a few hydrocarbons to help propel the fat from the bottle. Jolly good times!
