Artificial
Authentic sea and beach glass is becoming rarer and harder to find for a variety of reasons: there are more people searching for it and littering has increasingly staggered the making of it naturally.
This scarcity has led to some artisans and crafters tumbling poorer pieces of sea glass shards to create what is called "twice-tossed" glass, while others create artificial sea glass, or "craft glass", from ordinary glass pieces using a rock tumbler. While such glass is chunkier than most true sea glass, lacks its romantic provenance, and differs in many technical ways, e.g. long-term exposure to water conditions creates an etched surface on the glass that cannot be duplicated artificially it does meet the demand of crafters at a cheaper price and in a wider range of colors.
Read more about this topic: Sea Glass
Famous quotes containing the word artificial:
“The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution, which work with more energy than we believe, whilst we depend on artificial restraints.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“These are not the artificial forests of an English king,—a royal preserve merely. Here prevail no forest laws but those of nature. The aborigines have never been dispossessed, nor nature disforested.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)