Who Makes Up the Market for This?
By Christa TerrySea glass? Yes, please. It’s one of my things. Like the carved wooden masks I mentioned the other day and a certain print featuring naughty words that I just can’t seem to take out of my living room, I love me some sea glass. Having lived by the seashore all of my life, I’ve been pocketing it for as long as I can remember. My grandparents always had bowls of it around – they lived on the water – and when I called Costa Rica home, there was tons of it because glass bottles are still popular there for soda and tonic water. I always figured sea glass (or beach glass) was just one of those things you see and pick up.
I still grab it when I go to the beach, which is a lot, all year round.
What I didn’t know was that beach glass is apparently not just one of my things. Nope, it’s an industry and a hobby and a something people make money off of. Not near a coast? You can buy a bucket of beach glass. There is jewelry that features chunks of beach glass, and cosmetics inspired by it in fashion colors. There is, if you can believe it, even a book geared toward people like me who like to find beach Glass, called The Sea Glass Hunter’s Handbook. And other books besides!
But a $90 sea glass wreath from L.L. Bean? That’s where I have to draw the line. I probably have enough beach glass right here in my house to DIY a beach glass wreath but I’m going to do no such thing. this one is admittedly very cute, but it just seems like a waste of perfectly good beach glass. It’s also how I think of the sea glass jewelry I see at local arts fairs – I just can’t imagine anyone who’s lived all their lives on the coast buying a pair of sea glass earrings. Or an indoor-only sea glass wreath, especially since it’s not even real beach glass. It’s just tumbled glass, boo.
August 13th, 2010 at 6:04 am
Those pieces are so uniform in the LL Bean piece they are definitely not real sea glass. It’s priced high because certain colors of sea glass are rarer than others – white, brown and green being the most common. We probably have about 25-30 lbs of sea glass in the basement that we collected from the Chesapeake Bay while living in Baltimore. We used to go every weekend and Chris would obsessively hunt it while I played in the water and looked for clams and turtles along the shore. It even became a competition to see who could find the rarer colors first. We gave my mom a 10lb bucket of fragments before we moved with which to embed into her pottery and I have dreams of turning some of that sea glass into a mosaic of some sort one day.
August 13th, 2010 at 6:13 am
@Audrey You Would LOVE Costa Rica because you can find the rarer colors much more easily – like the lovely deep blues and things. I have tons of it, too, because I’m also an obsessive sea glass hunter and between where my grandparents used to live, being in Costa, and where we live now, there’s no shortage. No clue what to do with it, though.
August 13th, 2010 at 7:47 am
As someone who doesn’t live by the coast, perhaps you could explain to me why it makes more sense to collect it and have it sitting around but not to collect it and make objects out of it? To me, it seems like jewelry and home decorations are a logical extension of collecting something – anything, really. Stamps, shells, bottle caps, river stones, marbles and sea glass are all things that you can collect that have also been used for decorating the home and the self.
August 13th, 2010 at 11:19 am
@mcmiller I don’t disagree that it’d be fun to use collected sea glass to make stuff – I was thinking more along the lines of if you do live by the coast and collect it, it might feel odd to spend money on crafts using it as the primary material that other people have made.