June 18, 2011. Paul Hixon
The handmade lampwork beads formed from the imagination of an artist and made in his or her studio can be a thing of beauty. These beads require the skill of the artist and the best materials and techniques.
Thus they command much better prices than the lampwork beads made in a factory setting.
All glass beads not made by machine are lampwork beads. This means a human being winds melted glass from a glass rod around a mandrel to form the bead. The differences in the two types of lampwork beads are the types of glass, human imagination and time needed to complete the lampwork glass beads.
A simple, one color lampwork bead is easily made in either setting. The difference is in the time taken to make the bead as perfect as possible. In a factory setting, the worker is paid by the bead and the standards are lower for acceptable lampwork beads wholesale. An artist puts his name on his beads, figuratively speaking, and thus wants to make the best beads possible, even when making the simple ones.
The artist can make the beads he wants, while the factory lampworker is given a pattern to follow, design-wise. Thus the artist gets to use his imagination, and can make the lampwork bead as complex as he desires. The factory worker makes the same design over and over, and no imagination is allowed, making these lampwork beads tedious to form and allowing the quality to slip because no one really cares.
The factory worker has materials given to him, and these are not necessarily the best glass available. The artist wants his beads to last forever, and therefore uses the best materials available, because using glass rods with different coefficients of expansion will cause a bead to destroy itself. The artist also takes the time to anneal his or her lampwork beads properly, which may not happen in the factory, leaving the factory beads brittle and easily broken.
Between the time of creation, imagination and quality of materials, it is obvious why artist made lampwork glass beads are more expensive than factory made beads by a factor of at least ten. Keep this in mind when looking at these two types of lampwork beads.
Updated June 18, 2011. Published March 26, 2011. Paul Hixon
