Now You Sea Me, Now You Don’t: Exploring Certain Sea Glass Colors

Genuine sea glass jewelry is a beautiful thing. Leave it to the ocean to take the glass that can be thousands of years old and create something beautiful from the glass litter in the sea. The types of beach glass that people collect from years of it tumbling and becoming smoothed from the ocean are numerous.

Human beings have been using glass containers for a very long time and they have often made their way into the water one way or another only to resurface later. There are, however, some that are rarer than others. Let’s explore some of the more common and the rarer sea glasses that are tumbling around the ocean.

White and Green

You’ve seen glass containers of these colors your whole life. Most glass bottles are either clear or green a la Coca-Cola and Sprite/beer bottles. The green is a bright emerald color and the white actually begins clear, but clouds into a frosted white over the years it spends rolling around in the surf.

Yellow and Black

Interestingly enough, yellow sea glass doesn’t always begin yellow at all. Sometimes it begins clear, but yellows over time from the ultraviolet rays of the sun tinting it. Black sea glass usually originated as dark-colored glass that darkened even further over time. Though, glass producers once made black glass by adding certain amounts of iron residue to the glass. Both colors are exceptionally rare and prized among homemade sea glass jewelry enthusiasts.

Orange

Orange is far and away the rarest type of sea glass, found once every 10,000 pieces. It was never a commonly produced color for glass products, but the fiery orange color was used to produce some decorative glass objects from nick-nacks to tableware. Because they’re the most common glass colors, they are also some of the oldest pieces of sea glass that you can find.

Of course, there are many different sea glass colors floating around out there waiting to be picked up. The world of sea glass colors is wider than you might think. As deep and wide as the ocean is, there’s glass undiscovered in the deepest reaches waiting for the right moment to shine once it’s washed up onto the shore.