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 Being Purple
by Alice Korach
Purple is often a fugitive color in glass beads. Many of the most beautiful purple seed beads are dyed, painted (inside or outside), or coated, and very few of those wonderful purple colors are light- or color-fast. It’s just the nature of the color. It tends to go away over time. It’s interesting to note, however, that if you’re a lampworker and use Moretti/Effetre glass, black rods are not really black but dense purple. When pulled out into fine stringers and used to paint tiny details or fine lines on a molten bead, these thin applications of black show up as purple when cool. Effetre also makes a few very pretty purple glasses, but not many when compared to the other color families.
 In gemstones, too, purple is one of the less common colors. And when it’s an intense purple, it’s usually pretty expensive. Probably my favorite purple gemstone is sugilite. High quality sugilite is a wonderful intense, bright purple a little on the red side, as opposed to amethyst, which tends toward the blue side of purple. I have one or two small wonderfully rich sugilite beads that I got from Africa John (www.africajohns.com or 509-773-6924), who hand-cuts all his stone beads. A few Tucsons ago when I visited him at the Best Bead Show, he was really excited because he’d found a large quantity of high-quality sugilite rough, an uncommon occurrence.
In my own pāte de verre work, I’m constantly in quest of a really good purple. Bullseye, the maker of the glass I use, has two or three pretty purple colors of frit (ground glass), but when they go into a plaster mold and are melted, they don’t come out nearly so purple. The most intense, gold-purple, sometimes looks great, but mostly it reacts with the plaster and forms a nasty white scale. Deep purple comes out looking like dark royal blue and dark plum and lavender both go blue. I’ve had some modest success mixing them with cranberry to get a more purple look, but purple is still a color I tend to want much more often than to have.
Not long ago, I tried out purple from the inside. My doctor ordered a test of the autonomic nervous system. Sweating is one of the autonomic nerve functions, so the test involves different approaches to measuring how and where you sweat. In the last part of the  test, you don a hideous blue and white houndstooth check Tyvek bikini (that’s the plastic material they use to seal new construction). The technician dusts you down with a pink, powdery dye that turns purple wherever it gets wet, and you lie in a dry sauna for an hour. Then she takes blackmail-quality photos of you. After that, you get to take a long, hot shower. Then you go home and take half a dozen more, but it still takes a couple of days for all the purple to go away. Sometimes purple isn’t as fugitive as one might wish.
It’s interesting and kind of fun to be purple. But I didn’t get any insights into how to make a better purple glass. What I did realize is that purple is special. It’s not a garden variety color, and great purple beads are scarce. If purple is one of your passions, you should buy purple beads that sing to you whenever you find them. They’re likely not to be available for long. Like all the special joys in life, purple happens when you least expect it. You need to appreciate it whenever and wherever you find it. Purple is a gift to be treasured.
Jovanna Pablano used turquoise and sugilite beads in this dramatic necklace. Her pendant has a central piece of sugilite with 22kt gold beads and and three dangles of sugilite, turquoise and Swarovski gold glass beads. $450.00
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