Soot formation processes have been studied for more than 100 years, they include empirical and phenomenological description of conversion of various fuels to soot particles. This article provides an overview of current state of soot formation foundations, including the chemistry of soot nucleation, nucleation, mass growth as well as size of soot particles. Consideration of this issue shows that a great progress has been made, but there is still a lot of ambiguity in many areas of our knowledge. This concerns the role of aromatic molecules and radicals in nucleation and subsequent growth mass in laminar pre-mixed flames. Along with environmental problems, in recent time there are considered soot particles as an environment for nanomaterial synthesis, such as fullerenes, carbon nanotubes and graphenes. In this regard, a complete scheme of nanomaterials formation in mode of soot formation has been developed.