The Artisan Behind Your Favorite Earrings
Barbara Mellen works with several hundred specialty glass products, most but not all of them American-made. Some have a dichroic or an iridescent coating. Not all of them come in sheets. Some look like colorful spaghetti, noodles, flour, sand, or gravel. She cuts them into little pieces and fires them in a kiln to melt them together, round sharp edges, change some colors, and strengthen the dichroic surface.
Most kiln-fired glass is about a quarter inch thick, so most earrings made this way are heavy. Barbara Mellen's earrings are much thinner, so they can be worn comfortably all day.
Almost all the earrings are made at least partly from dichroic glass. It has a thin high-tech coating, each of many vacuum-deposited layers only a few millionths of an inch thick. Colors are determined by the quantity, composition, and thickness of the layers. Clear dichroic glass is one color lying on a dark background and the opposite color with more light behind than in front of it. The reflected color appears brighter on black glass, but the transmitted color can't be seen through black.
The ear wires and pendant bails are individually handcrafted from Argentium sterling silver by Sarah Mellen. Pure silver is too soft for jewelry. It's alloyed with other metals to strengthen it. A lot of sterling consists partly of nickel, which irritates some peoples skin. There is no nickel in Argentium sterling.