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Sea Glass Colors, Beach Glass Colors, Rare Seaglass Colors

Authentic sea glass colors reflect all the spectrum of glass colors and tones from clear to black that have been produced over the centuries.

Some sea or beach glass colors are common and easily found, while other colors are extremely rare. Why?

Mixed Colors Origins of Sea Glass

A brief look at the history of sea glass explains this. Glass was first made possibly as early as 1730 BC in Asia.

Glass is made from silica (historically in the form of sand) and alkali or soda ash (sodium carbonate), which can be extracted from the ashes of many plants. These two ingredients were melted together to form early glass.

This process, which makes soda-lime glass, is still the basic process used in making glass today.

What makes the different colors?

Clear (white), as we know, is made with soda-lime. Impurities in the sand used resulted in fairly-common pale green.

To produce colors the following minerals alone or combined with other minerals produce the following colors glass:

COLOR		PRIMARY MINERAL
	Bluish-green (beer and wine bottles)	Iron
	Amber, yellow, and near black	Sulphur
	Amethyst and purple	Manganese
	Red and pink	Selenium
	Ruby and cranberry	Metallic gold
	Blue	Cobalt
	White (opaque)	Tin
	Turquoise	Copper oxide
	Dark red (opaque)	Pure metallic copper
	Blue, violet, purple, and black	Nickel
	Fourescent yellow, green, and red	Uranium
	Orange-red to yellow	Silver

As you can see, some of the most beautiful colors involve not only much more costly ingredients, but the process involved also may cost significantly more to produce deep vibrant colors and so has generally only been used for limited production.

Naturally, the rare exotic hues are the most vibrant sea glass colors and also the most sought after by collectors for their sea glass collections and sea glass jewelry and sea glass art.