Making Clear Ice Cubes for styling Drinks and Liquids

One of the main reasons that ice cubes in good professional photographs that are used for commercial purposes,  are clear and your own ice cubes are not is because the ice cubes start off as much purer than what you're probably using in your home. Most people just take their frozen ice cube trays and run them under their tap water and then stick that in the freezer. If you've ever looked at a glass of your tap water, you'll know that the swirling things inside it aren't exactly conducive to making clear ice cubes. The water itself isn't clear, how would the ice cubes ever be clear?

So the first thing that you need to do to make clear ice cubes is to use clear water. This means that you should use distilled water. If it's clear in the bottle, it's going to be clear in a glass. You got to give one more treatment to remove dissolved gasses.  Take the pure water that you've bought, put it in a clean pan (preferably one rinsed out with this same water) and boil it. This helps to get rid of all of the excess minerals and gasses that can cloud up your water and make your ice cubes less clear.

You can increase the clarity of your ice cubes by using clean trays and a slow cooling process. Do not use cheap plastic ice cube trays, instead stick with metal ice trays which you clean with purified water before every use. Add the distilled and boiled water and freeze. You're ice cubes may be clear-quality that you look for in ice in Drinks and Liquid Shoots.

But some request for the cubes that sink to the bottom of the glass, but pure ice cubes being lighter than the water won’t  go down to the bottom. What you can do is just buy the artificial Food Stylist Ice cubes from speciality stores abroad. What I do is simply use Glass cubes, that are available at any Chinese import shops every nook and corner. You can see that in the picture.

Happy Styling 

Sridhar