Harlequin Opal Dice

Named for the unique coloration found in Harlequin Opals, these dice have the same intensely iridescent play of color from their namesake.

Opal

Arabic legends say opals falls from the heavens in blinding bursts of lightning. To the ancient Greeks, opals gave the gift of prophecy. To Dark Age Europeans have opals were a gem of hope, faith, and purity. In Ancient Rome opals were thought to bring the bearers good luck. Through out history humans have been fascinated with opal’s otherworldly colors. Nothing else in nature can replicate its sparkling fire and play of colors. Opal is beauty incarnate.

Handcrafted Excellence

We’re known for our lifetime warranty. Opal, not so much. So how did we get around opal’s natural propensity to chip? Simple – we cheated. This new line of dice has been crafted from a new type of synthetic opal and inlaid with solid brass numbers. But these epic level math rocks aint your daddy’s milky lack luster opalite dice.

It’s Time to Science!

Through a proprietary process, these synthetic opals 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 visual 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.