I haven’t yet decided if “Puff-Buff” sounds more like a children’s breakfast cereal created by Popeye or an especially enthusiastic adult film star, but either way I like the sound of it. Though this bias probably has to do more with the moniker’s onomatopoeic qualities than its probable significations, it serves The Polish design firm known as Studio Puff-Buff well. It’s also in curious compliance with their lighting products—from the bulbous and sensuous Big Pink, to the prickly and ethereal Blue Grass, and especially to the whimsical, gregarious, and most definitely flirtatious Bubbles Chandelier.

Bubbles Chandelier. Designed by Puff-Buff.

Begun in Poland in 2003 by principals Anna Siedlacka and Radek Achramowicz, the company synthesizes the best of architecture with both industrial and interior design or, as Puff-Buff says in their rough yet charming translation from the Polish, “working across various scales and materials studio has created objects and environmental projects with focus on flexibility, transparency, new technologies but always connected with pleasure and delight.” I suppose we’ll forgive them for omitting the occasional article, especially while their lighting division continues to produce such gems as Bubbles I and II—a pair of diaphanous, dangling aggregations of transparent orbs, or, in more technical parlance, inflatable, flexible elements of transparent, high-gloss PVC with plastic click-joints, 100-170 inserted LEDs, and polished stainless steel for the frame.

I hope you’ll forgive me for running on so (and for sounding a bit like the J. Peterman catalog from Seinfeld), but something about Bubbles just brings this out in me. Perhaps it’s her clever use and re-invention of a traditionally utilitarian material; or it could be her evocation of the bubble wrap of my youth; but, most likely, it’s her innovative aesthetic and, how do you say it? Ah yes, joie de vivre, for in the last analysis, you can truly see right through her, and there’s no doubting that she’s 100 percent, pure, unadulterated fun.