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 reflection 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-resistible 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.
