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:
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not they back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“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)
“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)