Crystal and glass are two materials made using different technologies and from different stones. It is important to know the differences if there is a need to buy a crystal product, which is significantly different in price from glass. But sellers can pass off cheaper material as more expensive, presenting glass as crystal. In addition, the materials differ in appearance and durability. Crystal can be stored for a long time, and then sold out and get a good amount. Glass is a common item that has no value or interest to collectors.
Definition
Glass- This is a material of synthetic origin. It is made from artificial fibers. There are also natural materials that make very beautiful glass, but they are very rare. But such material will have a significant difference in cost from artificial analogues. Thus, glass made in compliance with ancient traditions is very beautiful.
Crystal is a crystalline substance of natural origin. It is a colorless variety of quartz. A special feature is its beautiful appearance and high cost. Crystal is a collectible item due to its appearance. Crystal tableware, for example, is carefully passed down from generation to generation.
Comparison
The main difference between these two materials is thermal conductivity. This can be determined by touch - glass will be much warmer than crystal. Even if you hold the material in your hands for a long time, the temperature of the crystal will not change. The glass will heat up very quickly. When heated, natural material will release heat much more slowly than artificial material.
Crystal is very difficult to damage. Yes, it won’t be difficult to break it, but it’s more difficult to do than with glass. If you drop glass, it will shatter into large pieces, while crystal breaks into small fragments. In addition, scratches and small cracks, as well as tarnished areas, form on the glass over time. Crystal is not influenced by physical factors. It maintains its integrity and shine for a long time.
Czech crystal Bohemia crystal
If you look closely at the glass, you can see small bubbles in its structure that appear during manufacturing. They do not spoil the appearance of the product, but this distinguishes it from crystal, which does not have such bubbles.
If you look through glass, the image will be slightly enlarged. Crystal bifurcates objects, but leaves them the same size. Even artificial crystal differs from glass in this way. Also, through the glass, looking at the light, you can see lines (lines). This phenomenon is not observed in crystal.
Crystal has a characteristic sound. If you run wet fingers over it, you can hear a pleasant ringing sound. Also, when two crystal products come into contact, a growing hum appears, sounding for a long time. The glass can only make a dull thud.
Conclusions website
- Crystal is more expensive. The difference is noun, several times.
- Crystal is difficult to break.
- Crystal emits a long hum when in contact with the same material.
- Glass magnifies objects.
- Small bubbles can be seen inside the glass.
- The glass heats up quickly in your hands.
- Crystal makes your hands cooler.
- Crystal is valuable to collectors.
- Glass is more affordable to purchase.
- It deteriorates over time, becomes dull and acquires minor damage, unlike crystal.
Man-made crystal production
During the times of Ancient Rome, it was believed that crystal was water that had changed its properties.
Today, simple glass has replaced crystal. Large Russian enterprises, unable to withstand the influx of cheap goods, are closing their production facilities. Many people try to sell glass items under the guise of crystal; this is a marketing ploy designed for a not very knowledgeable consumer.
Gifts as a symbol of the era, huge paintings, sculptures, handmade carpets and, of course, crystal products, court officials pampered their idols with such gifts, and all on a royal scale. Crystal was given to “high-ranking people” and in tsarist times, during the Soviet period, they still give crystal now.
Melting crystal
Crystal is also glass, but lead oxide is necessarily added to it, which gives the material completely new properties, such as transparency and melodious ringing. In addition to lead, crystal also contains other components, such as antimony and arsenic. Everything is poured into a huge, three-story building, oven, and about a hundred tons of crystal are boiled in it.
Is the lead component of crystal dangerous or not?
Lead experts explain this:
When the crystal mass is melted, the lead is already in a chemical bond with other components of the glass and cannot be released anywhere else.
Therefore, crystal glassware is not at all dangerous.
Glass blowers and conveyor
Next, glassblowers get to work. For master glassblowers, everything is simple and harmonious: a soft glass ball is lowered into the desired mold made of heat-resistant steel. More complex things are blown without any preparations. In the next workshop there is a conveyor, scissors automatically cut off a piece of the melt, which is spit out onto a rotating mold, drawn, removed and the product is ready. Tea glasses, shot glasses, small glasses, etc. are made on conveyors. A rare crystal item is, of course, only a handmade product.
Annealing
An important stage in crystal production is the so-called “annealing” of the product - this is a process in which the temperature of heated crystal slowly drops to room temperature over four hours. If you cool the glass sharply, the outer layers will give off heat faster than the inner ones and the wine glass will simply burst.
Cutting
The next stage is cutting. At this stage, vases, wine glasses, trays are cut - wedge-shaped grooves are applied. The deeper and sharper the edges, the more the rays of light are refracted and reflected and the crystal begins to sparkle with all the colors of the rainbow.
Chemical grinding
Next comes chemical grinding of the crystal, including sulfur. The air in this workshop is saturated with caustic fumes, and after a few minutes the throat begins to sore. After applying the cut, the diamond edge becomes matte; to make it transparent, the products are placed in special cassettes, suspended on a special installation and alternately dipped in acid and water. Gradually, the top layer is corroded, and the surface becomes perfectly smooth and polished.
The end of the 70s in the Soviet family, crystal is considered a sign of wealth. Enterprises are increasing the pace and volume of production, tableware made from this material is becoming widespread and, as a result, the quality of crystal is decreasing. And today ordinary glass is in fashion, and crystal, if it remains the standard of refined taste, will only be for lovers of luxurious and expensive tableware.
Crystal has long been associated with luxury and a high standard of living. It is impossible to imagine an expensive classic interior without a crystal chandelier. Such lamps will never go out of fashion.
Let's figure out what is the difference between crystal and glass.
Crystal is much stronger than glass, so it is almost impossible to scratch it. The glass will fade over time and small scratches and abrasions will appear on it. Crystal is much more difficult to break than glass. When broken, crystal scatters into small pieces, glass breaks into large fragments.
Glass in your hands will heat up much faster than crystal, since these materials have different thermal conductivities.
In addition to quartz sand, lime and soda, admixtures of lead oxide or barium oxide are added to the composition of crystal. These impurities significantly increase the light refractive characteristics and create the so-called “play of color”.
Any glass containing lead oxide impurities cannot be called crystal. The content of these impurities must be at least 30%. If the oxide content is less than 30%, then it is crystal glass; if the impurities are less than 4%, then it is the most ordinary glass. The characteristics of such glass are significantly lower than crystal. Also, a high content of lead or barium oxides significantly improves the plastic properties of crystal. This is very important in the process of cutting and polishing crystal products. High-quality crystal is sometimes difficult to distinguish from precious stones.
If you add impurities of various metals to the molten crystal mass, you get very beautiful and spectacular colored crystal. For example, green crystal is obtained by adding copper, blue - cobalt, silicon gives the crystal a pink color, and cadmium - red. Colored crystal elements are widely used to decorate chandeliers, sconces, and floor lamps by Czech manufacturers Bohemia IVELE Crystal And .
When choosing a crystal chandelier, you need to take into account that often unscrupulous manufacturers replace crystal with the most ordinary cut glass. Only a specialist can distinguish such counterfeits. Remember, a crystal chandelier cannot be cheap, since crystal production is a very labor-intensive process and requires a lot of effort. You can purchase crystal chandeliers only from well-known, time-tested factories. When you see a chandelier that looks very similar to the original Czech product, which differs in price by 2 or even more times, rest assured that this is an ordinary piece of glass, there is no high-quality crystal in it. Require product certificates.
The Kvadro Light online store cooperates only with official suppliers of Czech crystal chandeliers. When purchasing a Czech crystal chandelier in our online store, you can be sure that you have purchased an original certified product.
You can buy a crystal chandelier in the Kvadro Light online store without prepayment. Pay for your order upon receipt in all cities of the Russian Federation.
The word “crystal” itself has Greek roots. The Greeks used the word "crystal" to call quartz without foreign impurities, for its ideal transparency, considering it to be frozen ice. These crystals were used to make lenses that were used to light fire. There is even a known case when a samovar was made for Peter I from a huge piece of rock crystal - this is how transparent quartz without foreign inclusions began to be called in Russia. And the first manufactory producing crystal products appeared in our country in the 13th century in the city of Gus Khrustalny.
Types of crystal
The following types of crystal are distinguished:
- Rock crystal is natural quartz;
- Lead crystal is glass containing lead oxide;
- Barium crystal is crystal that uses barium instead of lead;
- Bohemian crystal is crystal that uses potassium-lime glass instead of lead and barium.
History of the appearance and properties of crystal
The idea of creating crystal from glass belongs to the British: they were the first to add lead oxides to it to improve the quality of glass, after which it acquired an unusual “voice”, transparency and sparkling edges. The “vocal” abilities of crystal, its transparency, strength, weight, shine and other properties depend on the percentage of lead oxide.
Gusev crystal is brewed with a lead oxide content strictly equal to 24%, which corresponds to amazing optical properties and high density. Thanks to this, we can observe the multicolor play of light in the edges, the shine of surfaces and hear a wonderful melodic ringing.
As the technology for producing crystal from silicon sand improved, it began to include the addition of, in addition to lead oxide, boric acid, arsenic and antimony compounds.
To create colored crystal, various additives are used: cobalt gives pure blue tones, for red - cadmium or gold compounds are added, for pink - silicon. Copper oxide makes crystal green, and manganese oxides give it an exquisite purple color.
In tsarist times, at the Gusevsky factory, crystal dishes and crystal vases were also painted using colloidal gold and uranium oxides.
These were quite expensive, but also the most beautiful pieces of art.
Typically, a crystal product is decorated with engraving - a shallow matte pattern, cutting - a wide polished edge, carving - deep grooves, at the intersection of which a mesh appears (the so-called "diamond edge",) and grinding.
After grinding, the edges acquire a special shine. Faceted crystal, refracting light, creates bright rainbow reflections.
Crystal production
To get crystal, you need to melt the charge from which the crystal is made. The charge is a mixture of sand, potash and lead oxide; its presence is the main difference between crystal and plain glass.
The raw materials are melted in furnaces at enormous temperatures of over 1500 degrees Celsius. The molten mass cools very quickly. To speed up the process, several people work on one product at once.
Master blowers, typesetters and pressers work at the furnace. Blowers are armed with special tubes with a rubber bulb. A drop of hot crystal is taken at one end of the glass blowing tube and the product is blown into a mold using a rubber bulb. The master compositor has a typesetting tube. With its help, he collects the required amount of glass melt from the furnace and brings it to the press master, who controls the mold.
After the product is blown and given the required shape, it enters the furnace for annealing. Annealing is designed to cool the crystal more evenly. In the annealing oven, the temperature is reduced from 700 degrees to 40–50 degrees within 1.5 hours.
Next, in the flame of a gas burner, the upper part of the product, where the glass blowing tube was, is cut off.
After this, the product undergoes the first quality control: are there any large bubbles, stones, or curvature of the leg; measure the thickness of the glass layer.
Smooth products are decorated with a diamond cut. To begin with, markings are applied to the product, after marking, the product is placed on a conveyor and goes from master to master. The process of applying a diamond edge starts with the largest abrasive wheel and ends with the smallest ones. To prevent glass dust from entering the respiratory tract, water is supplied to the abrasive wheels.
The choice of dishes today is huge and varied. But there are products that, with their appearance, immediately “speak” about their status and “breed”. And they are always in “piece” execution. This primarily applies to high-quality porcelain, luxurious crystal and handmade glass glasses.
How to correctly distinguish crystal from glass when you want to buy crystal glassware and vice versa? There are several specific features that distinguish this type of glass. And first, let’s take a closer look at each of these materials.
What is glass?
Natural glass is very rare today. This natural material appears as a result of global natural disasters, which are not so frequent. This includes the fall of meteorites, the impacts of which are capable of transforming rock into a glassy mass. Active, huge volcanoes erupt lava, which sometimes eventually forms volcanic glass. And, of course, these types of materials have nothing to do with glassware.
But organic glass is exactly the material from which it is customary to create vessels and other utensils. Organic glass is always of artificial origin and created by human hands. The composition of the raw material may vary, but the main components are always quartz sand, feldspar and boric acid.
What is crystal?
Crystal, like glass, can be natural or artificial. The natural type includes rock crystal, which is formed in the voids of rocks and limestone, quartz veins and slate. The mineral is unusually hard and transparent. Often used in the jewelry industry as decorative inserts in jewelry.
Artificial crystal is created from glass with the addition of lead oxides in different proportions. Moreover, each country has its own composition, where the amount of lead content is individual. For example, European crystal contains about 10% lead oxides. In Russian crystal this percentage may be higher. In this regard, experts often call crystal glass with the following definitions: lead; high lead. From this we can distinguish two main types of artificial crystal:
- Classic crystal (high-lead glass), which contains up to 24-30% lead oxide.
- Crystal (lead glass) containing less than 24% lead oxides.
Bohemian crystal contains barium instead of lead and glass, which consists of a large amount of calcium.
What is the advantage of artificial crystal? It is ideal for decoration, as lead gives the material additional plasticity. Ornaments, drawings, and engravings are created on the crystal surface. Undoubtedly, this is a huge advantage in the production of artistic tableware and decorative items.
What is the difference between crystal and glass?
There are a number of signs by which crystal can be visually distinguished from glass without resorting to laboratory tests.
Thermal conductivity. The most distinctive physical property in materials is the difference in their thermal conductivity. heats up faster in your hand, becoming warm. Crystal dishes are always cool, no matter how long they are in warm palms.
Hardness and strength. To break a crystal object, you need to make some effort, which cannot be said about glass products. There are never scratches on the crystal surface, which also confirms its hardness. But steel objects, for example, can leave marks on glass objects.
Don't focus on price. Although, of course, crystal is more expensive to produce and therefore costs more. But some types of handmade glass glasses are several times higher than the price tags of crystal products.
The above practical tips will help you more effectively understand the question of how to distinguish crystal from glass. And one moment. If the authenticity of the crystal is still in doubt, it is better to contact a specialist - an expert in this field.
