You may have noticed that I have mentioned Dichroic Glass a number of times throughout Prettyful. As it is not an everyday word I thought you might like a brief explanation of what it is and why it is so special

Dichroic Glass is not a new type of glass, pendants made entirely of dichroic glass beads can be traced back to Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece as early as 2500 B.C.  It has been created and utilised by glass artists throughout history.

Modern Dichroic Glass or 'Dichro' is created in space age conditions. The glass is created in a vacuum, in a 'clean environment'. Black or clear glass is coated with many, many layers of metal oxides which combined gives the glass its special optical effects. Materials like gold, silver, silica and titanium are vaporised by an electron beam in the vacuum. As the vapour condenses on the surface of the glass it forms a crystal structure which gives us the amazing colours and patterns loved and used by glass artists. 

The finished piece of glass can have between 30 and 50
layers of metals and oxides to give it the desired effect. It is then finished off with a layer of quartz crystal to protect the surface. What all this technolgy results in simply is a piece of very special glass that refelects and transmits differant colours at the same time!!

Dichroic glass is amazing to work with, and makes wonderful and eyecatching pieces of glass work, it woks especially well in jewellery as your bodies movement will show the colour shifts that are inherant in the glass.   Your jewellery will show an array of colours depending on the angle it is viewed from.

So! even when you are buying just a little pair of pink dichroic
stud earrings consider all that that little bit of glass has gone through all, of that space age technology. Amazing!

Beautiful as it is Dichroic glass has a couple of issues! One, it is very, very hard to photograph accurately, as you can imagine photographs of the same piece of jewellery can look a different colour if taken from different angles! So please keep this in mind when you are ordering dichroic jewellery, I am sure you won't be disappointed in fact customers are often amazed at the colours in the jewellery when they receive it. The second issue is cost! All of that technology and process makes dichroic glass very expensive to buy so please bear that in mind. You are getting something very, very special when you choose a piece of dichroic glass jewellery.