Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Purple Bottles

Back in June (some 140 days ago) I placed three antique bottles in an ultraviolet (UV) light chamber I fashioned from an extra trash bin in my garage.   The idea was to turn the bottles purple.  

Not just any old bottle will turn purple.  The bottles need to have been manufactured somewhere between the 1880s and the 1920s.  Clear bottles from that era were manufactured with manganese dioxide in the glass.  When exposed to UV light, the manganese dioxide turns the glass purple.

Yesterday afternoon, I fished the bottles from the light chamber to check progress.  They have definitely blushed to a deeper shade of purple.   I captured a couple images of the bottles and then placed them back in the chamber again.  I am going let the bottles “roast” in the light chamber for a while more.



A Single Bottle



All Three Bottles

Mitchell Hegman

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