Mystic Opal Dice

A Note on Photography

Try as we might, 3 different cameras and 2 days spent in the photo studio, we can’t seem to do these dice justice. We pride ourselves on being able to capture the essence of our dice in our photography. Not so this time. The colors in these dice are IMPOSSIBLE to photograph. The vibrant colors combined with the iridescent pink play of color seem to elude the CCD’s of our cameras. These photos simply do not capture the true beauty of these fiery opalescent polyhedrals.

It’s Time to Science!

Through a proprietary process, our synthetic opal roughs are made by capturing tiny silica particles in a resin matrix. The end result is flawless in execution, beauty, and gameability (if that’s not a word, it is now) and it has the same level of fire and play of color you’d expect in a quality natural stone unlike those subpar opalite dice languishing in your daddy’s dice bag. This process nets a toughness to the resulting die that natural opal just doesn’t have while retaining the &essence and heft of the original stone.

Play of Color

Opals are known for their unique ability to produce dazzling rainbows of color that seem to flicker like the flames of a fire as the stone is rotated. This is called play of color  and is caused by millions of microscopic silica spheres around 0.5 microns in size that are arranged in an amorphous lattice.

Image courtesy of Geology.com

These silica structures diffract the light rays as they passes through them, and it is these diffracted light rays that cause the bursts of color seen in both natural and high quality synthetic opal. The size of the silica spheres and their arrangement determine the color and quality of diffracted light.

Galactic Opals

From Ethiopia, to Australia, and Mexico to Idaho, Opals can be found around the world. That’s not where they stop though as recently scientists have not only discovered how to make these beautiful gems in the lab but a team from NASA has found opal on Mars, and seeing as opal only forms in liquid water, this is proof positive that the red planet was once in fact blue.