In a distant country of France, where poets were singing sonnets
to beautiful women, a Jeweler George Frederick Strass created an
idea of covering a faceted glass with a special metal powder.
There was nothing special about covering glass with metal, but..
this special covering was creating an unusual, rainbow-like
effect on glass, which made it look just like diamonds!
Can you imagine wearing glass that looks like a diamond. That
has the same rainbow effect, but it costs 10 times less? It
blows my mind actually. Diamonds at half price -okay, I can
imagine this, but ten times cheaper? Unbeliveable!
Are
there any valid reasons to wear glass instead of geniuine
diamond? Of course – first of all it may be unacceptable to wear
real diamonds in daylight. You might be worried about your
security. The wheater may be against you – for example – you can
be on beach, where real diamonds aren’t acceptabel. Yet the
rhinestone jewelry is not expensive at all and you can wear a
lot of it. Some of it can even be attached directly to your
body.
Rhinestones, put simply, are glasses with
faceted top and a very thin foil at the very bottom – that way
the light reflects and refracts in glass like it couldn’t -
because glass is less refreactive tha diamonds – light passes it
through, when in real diamonds a full inner refleсtion is
happening.
Chaton Roses are flat-bottom rhinestones
(it is pronounce “shayton”). They have Aurora Boreale effect
(“Northern Lights”, which can be seen in Northern Poles when
millions of ion particles enter unprotected with magnetic field
atmosphere). It’s just a matter of simple physics dispersion
(hmm, didn’t we all learn this at school), and the laws of the
light were discovered in 10th centuries (actually rediscovered
in 17th century) and it took centuries to apply it to glass to
make it seem like a diamond (talking about rhinestone jewellery
of course).
So what are they uses for those little
sprkling things? Chaton Roses have a lot of uses, like body
jewelry (some of it can even be used to swim – a special kind of
glue makes it water-resistable for a week or so, and it looks
really amazing – actually I was pretty stunned when I first saw
this kind of body jewelry); it is also used in dance costumes,
as bridal jewelry.
These stones are real
jewelry-makers dream. But you’d better be persistent enough –
you might need tens of thousands of stones to decorate a
costume, yet you might need only tens to make a little
love-heart shaped thing near your belly button. It’s really fun
and think of the looks of it.
The most known brand
to produce such crystals is (of course) Swarovski crystals. You
should easily find those in Internet.