Liquid bromine and bromine vapor. This is a sample of almost 2.5 grams of bromine. This bromine was prepared for experimentation purposes only and is not stored later on. It was used immediately for some fun experiments and hence, it only resided in the vial for several hours. Do not attempt to store bromine in elemental form in your home lab, not as liquid, nor as vapor, nor dissolved in water.

When water is added to bromine, then the bromine dissolves partly and a big drop of liquid bromine remains at the bottom of the vial.

I also purchased a sample of bromine, in a totally sealed quartz ampoule. The bromine in such an ampoule can safely be displayed and stored. The picture below shows this ampoule. It was cooled down a little at the above ⅔ part and it was heated up with the hand in the lower ⅓ part. This results in evaporation and subsequent condensation of the bromine. This effect is similar to condensation of water, but now with nice deep red/brown droplets of bromine, which are formed on the inside of the ampoule.

The ampoule contains 1.3 grams of bromine and it has a length of 7 cm.

When one is viewing through a larger layer of bromine vapor, then the vapor is really red. The following sample is a nice glass sphere of 6 cm diameter, containing a small amount of liquid bromine and its almost pure vapor above it. This sphere was filled with bromine, while the air inside was evacuated, resulting in an almost pure bromine atmosphere, with an intense deep red color.

Another nice property of bromine is that when it is stored in a glass bottle or ampoule, that it does not wet the glass when it is shaken. This is nicely demonstrated in the following videos:

• bromine, shaken in a glass ampoule (download size appr. 1.2 MByte)
• bromine, shaken in a glass ampoule (download size appr. 1.7 MByte)

The picture below shows the ampoule, which I made myself.