Only AB coated
follows the sun

Four of these five put the same colour on your wall at nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. AB does not. Aurora borealis coating adds thin-film interference on top of ordinary refraction, and interference colour depends on the angle light arrives at — so as the sun tracks across a window, the colours move with it. That is the whole reason a beaded plant is worth hanging up rather than photographing once.

The other four each fail at it differently. Acrylic is moulded, so its facets come out domed and smear light instead of splitting it. Electroplating looks the most expensive of the lot and blocks 86% of the light — the coating that makes it shine is the coating that stops it reaching the wall. Plain glass is honest and completely static. Lead crystal genuinely splits light furthest, and costs more than ten times as much per bead to do one thing less.

None of that is a claim about my beads specifically — it is true of anyone’s with the same coating, and every number on this page is a standard optical value you can check. What I can tell you is that I ran the comparison before I picked, and the beads in every piece I sell are the winner of it.

One bead, five materials, real glass — transmission and refractive index, not a photograph. The numbers underneath are the actual parameters the render is given, so nothing here is a mood board.

Switch between them and watch the right-hand side. Acrylic barely marks it. Electroplated goes dim. Plain glass and crystal throw real colour but the same colour every time. AB is the one that keeps changing.

That fourth tab is not a recommendation I am making from a catalogue. It is the bead in every piece I sell, and it has been since I found it.

The same argument in a form you can scan in ten seconds.

Refractive indices are standard optical values you can check anywhere. The strips are illustrative; the render above runs the actual physics.

AB is a micro-thin layer of metal vapour deposited onto glass in a vacuum chamber. The film is thin enough that light bouncing off its surface and light bouncing off the glass beneath it arrive slightly out of step and interfere — cancelling some wavelengths, reinforcing others.

That is why the colour shifts as you move. It is the same thing happening in a soap bubble or a film of oil on a puddle, done to a controlled thickness. No dye is involved, which is why an AB coat cannot fade the way a painted finish does.

Faceted glass on its own already splits white light — that is refraction, and an uncoated bead is an honest suncatcher. What it will not do is change. AB adds a second, angle-dependent source of colour on top, so as the sun tracks across a window the interference colours move with it.

“Iridescent” is an umbrella word. It covers a proper vapour-deposited AB layer and it also covers surface films that rub off, which is why on its own it tells you almost nothing.

Electroplated is the one worth understanding, because it sounds like an upgrade. A metallic layer is plated onto the glass for a lustrous finish, and it works by reflecting. It is brilliant in the hand and photographs beautifully. Switch the render above to it and watch the wall go dim: the coating that makes it shine is the coating that stops light getting through.

Aurora borealis coating is a specific, physical thing — manufacturing, not marketing. What is not specific is the phrase on a listing. No standard defines it and nobody certifies it, so the same two words get printed on dipped and sprayed iridescent lacquer, which looks identical in a product photo and scuffs off with handling. The process is real; the word is unenforced. Same as “leather”.

So the question is never whether a listing says AB. It is whether anyone in the chain can tell you how these particular beads were coated. A seller who specified them can. A seller forwarding a supplier photo cannot.

Lead oxide raises the refractive index to between about 1.55 and 1.70 depending on how much of it there is, and measured on a bench it splits light further than anything else here. That is a real advantage and worth saying plainly.

In a window it is a much closer call, because an AB coat produces interference colour that uncoated crystal cannot produce at all, and once the light is moving and the wall is across the room the gap largely closes.

Then there is the arithmetic. Lead crystal beads run about $2 each. AB-coated glass is about 17 cents at retail. A 720-bead piece would carry $1,440 of beads instead of $120, before the pot, the wire, the chain or the work of threading 720 beads onto wire one at a time — somewhere past $1,500 finished, for a difference you would have to hunt for. That is the actual reason beaded plants are not made of it.

Beyond the coating, four things decide whether a bead is usable in a plant at all:

• 8mm faceted teardrop is the standard for the leaves. 6mm reads more delicate but takes proportionally longer to string for the same visual mass.
• Top-drilled, not centre-drilled. Teardrops hang from the narrow end. Centre-drilled beads sit wrong and no amount of wire fixes it — this is the single most common thing people get wrong ordering their own.
• 0.3mm or 0.5mm plated copper wire. 0.3mm is what most people reach for — cheaper, and it goes through a tight drill hole without a fight. I string mine on 0.5mm, about 24 gauge: heavier wire holds a strand’s curve instead of letting it hang limp, at the cost of being fussier to thread. Either works. Thinner than 0.3mm does not.
• Count, not weight. “100g of beads” tells you nothing you can plan a piece around. A small plant is ~125 beads over 10 strands, a large one 720 over 24. Most land between 200 and 300, and you want about 10% spare because the drill hole is where they break.

The hard part of buying beads is not the price, it is that you cannot tell what you are getting until the bag is open — and by then you have already waited three weeks. These are the five ways an order goes wrong, in the order they cost you the most:

• Centre-drilled, when the listing said top. A teardrop for a suncatcher has to hang from its narrow end. A centre-drilled bead sits sideways and no amount of wire fixes it, so the whole bag is scrap.
• A different green. AB colour comes from film thickness, so two lots from the same seller months apart genuinely do not match. Run short halfway through a piece and the replacement batch can cost you the piece rather than the beads.
• A coating that is not a coating. Dipped or sprayed iridescent lacquer photographs identically to vapour-deposited AB and comes away under a thumbnail. You find out when a finished piece starts going dull in the window.
• Chipped facets and cracked drill holes. Nobody opened the bag before it shipped. A hairline crack at the hole survives the post perfectly well and then breaks while you are stringing, usually after the strand is already threaded.
• Acrylic sold as glass, or a count sold by weight. “100g of beads” is not a number you can plan a piece around.

None of these are recoverable. On a $6 bag from overseas there is no practical remedy except buying it again and waiting again, which is why the cheapest beads are so often the most expensive ones.

I did not set out to sell beads. I set out to find good ones, and it took me a very long time.

I know that list because I paid for all of it. Days of sample orders, most of them wrong in one of those five ways, each one a small amount of money and a week gone. The one that finally stopped me was a green I loved and could not order twice, because nobody in the chain knew which coating run it came from.

When I found it I bought it properly — by the strand, at freight volume, tens of thousands at a time, which is the only way the price comes down far enough to matter. And then it seemed daft to make everybody else run the same search.

That is the only reason the bead packs exist. Not a product line — the search, already done, at the price the volume earns rather than what a marketplace would mark it up to. Forty beads from $6.49, ninety from $13.49 — five greens in 8mm and a 6mm, shipped from California, USA in 2–5 days.

Making one yourself? The full method is here. Nobody else in this category will tell you how their beads were coated, because nobody else chose them. I can tell you what this one does at four in the afternoon in a west-facing window, because I have watched it do it a few hundred times.

Every pack is checked by hand before it is sealed. I go through them for chipped facets, cracked drill holes, dull or patchy coating, and beads that are simply the wrong green. The rejects come out and go in the scrap tin.

This is not a claim about anyone else’s ethics, it is about what their process can physically include. A parcel picked in a fulfilment warehouse is picked as a sealed bag — nobody opens it, because opening it is the expensive part. Whatever the factory put in is what arrives, and you are the quality check.

It matters most on the drill hole. Teardrops are top-drilled and the hole is the weak point; a bead with a hairline crack there survives the post and breaks while you are stringing it, usually after you have already threaded the strand.

It wins when things must match — a second batch for a piece you already started, or several pieces that have to look like a set. Nobody reselling from a marketplace can tell you which coating run you are getting, because they do not know. It also wins when you want them this week rather than next month, which is a real difference and not a marketing one.

It loses on volume, and I will say so. If you are buying in the thousands I am not the right supplier — I split imported strands into packs of forty and ninety, the right size for one or two suncatchers and the wrong size for a production run. And if you want a colour outside the four I stock, a craft store lets you hold it up to the light first, which is worth paying for on a colour you have never seen finished.

• Hold it to a window. A transflective coat still lets light through and casts colour. A reflective one lights up in your hand and puts almost nothing on the wall behind it.
• Look for a daylight photograph. Every coating looks spectacular under a ring light. Only some do anything in a room. If every photo is on a white studio sweep, you are buying blind.
• Distrust “crystal” on its own. In bead marketing it usually means faceted glass, not lead crystal. Neither is bad; they are just not the same thing at the same price.
• Ask how they were coated. Not whether the listing says AB — anyone can type that. Whether a human in the chain knows the answer.