BOREALIS: Why did Borealis go down like that?

Borealis. Borealis Borealis Borealis. Our problem child. We know you wanted it, because after we posted a fifteen second video of our Kev rolling a hot ball of glass over some frit on TikTok, you guys went crazy! We think it was in the name – evocative, promising, colorful. But you asked about it in the comments - and asked again, and again, and again. So when we were doing a photo shoot for our online-available Special Edition 384 Water Bottles for Water Bottle Week, we indulged the demand and took some stellar photos of it. (Can we take a moment and congratulate our photographer Toril Lavender for cooking up our dramatic photoshoot backdrops for our Special Edition Water Bottles? [and yes, we know you also want to see the bottles against a white backdrop, and we will always give you those, too!])

So why were there only sixty? The secret is in the challenges of coming up with a new color in our furnaces. We are blessed to have a color archive of 1200 or so different hues and shades. But! Those color recipes are decades, sometimes a even a century, old — so there’s always a translational process. How do we get Color A if we don’t use chemicals X, Y, and Z anymore? 

So when we buckled down to get our new green, Malachite, dialed in, it took time. We trial one recipe – and then check the color, the consistency, the clarity. No matter how good we are, this process is trial and error – and until very recently, we ran these experiments in our industrial-sized furnaces. That means when we don’t get to where we need to go, we still have a large quantity of “inaccurate” (but in most cases perfectly lovely!!!) glass color. 

We don’t waste a thing here at Blenko! So even if the color wasn’t the one we wanted, we knew some of you would – and so we almost always “water bottle it out” of the furnace to make space to get to the color we want. In almost all cases, the ‘unwanted’ color is irreplicable – that is, it can’t be made again because it wasn’t intended to be made to begin with. In all cases, these between colors are limited. Sometimes, though, we catch the color and match it to just the right color frit – and make lemonade out of lemons. We think Borealis was one of the tastiest glasses of lemonade we’ve made!

All of this is to say, we hear you. We wish there could be more, but we can’t make more of this water bottle exactly. That said, we think the frit color combination is mighty sharp, and so we are experimenting with other base colors that we can replicate. Stay tuned – the prototyping is almost done on our Northern Lights 384 Water Bottle. (And we promise that this one will be available online!)