Nothing new.
Swimming pools, sailboats, garden gnomes, faux waterfalls ... Same process. Gaudy gunnite (shotcrete, if you prefer ...), mostly coveted by folks with absolutely no taste.
A Viennese designer has just snagged a prestigious international award for his new line of jewellery, which uses a new high-tech process to fashion the ornaments out of concrete. Can it be that I hold here in my mortal hands ... a lump of purest grey? "Concrete has incredibly beautiful aesthetics. As a material it can do a …
1 - you do *not* want *any* piercing jewellery made out of concrete. Metal is available in some eyewatering gauges and 316L is heavy.
2 - I'm sure it does, but as the quote famously has it, "the shaft stretched twice as long is half as wide". Swings and roundabouts, dear boy.
(Icon is howling in pain)
"Swimming pools, sailboats, garden gnomes, faux waterfalls ..>"
Concrete jewelry has been around a while too.
"mostly coveted by folks with absolutely no taste."
Concrete can look spectacular, it can look shit and probably everything in-between - eye of the beholder and all that. To its credit, at least its not prone to making sweeping generalizations.
Much better uses for it than sat on someone's finger.
Personally, I'd rather be able to breathe the air than look at a shiny thing made artificially dull by spray-on concrete.
I'd be happier if they used man-made Pd though, "forged in a nuclear furnace" seems likely to be a selling point in this market, given the crazy "so hard to manufacture" talk that always comes with designer jewellery.
Structural reinforced concrete isn't simply "supported on an underlying metal structure" - the steel is required to provide tensile capacity and form a composite material. The lever arm between the allowable compressive force in the concrete and the tensile force in the steel then provides bending capacity.
Similarly, reinforced concrete columns require both longitudinal and transverse reinforcement to both increase the direct axial compression carrying capacity, and to provide tensile reinforcement against the bursting forces generated by the Poisson effect (i.e. "cream-caking").
It's not like you can take away the steel once the concrete has cured. Bad things tend to happen if you try.
Me too, especially as I recall an article in New Scientist 2 or 3 decades ago introducing us to high strength un-reinforced concrete. By using a carefully controlled mixture of very fine aggregate the inventors were, for example, able to make coil springs for car suspension out of concrete. So I expected all or most of the jewellery to be made of concrete.
What I'd like to see is some nice close up colour pictures to see what it actually looks like. Those are very pretty arty shots, but ultimately concrete is mineral grains in a matrix... If all those grains are highly polished I can imagine the resulting effect as being rather decorative - each different mineral grain reflecting separately...
I can then go on to visualise the same effect with something rather exotic as the mineral grains. For the really affluent how about diamond, ruby and sapphire grains in a metallic matrix? They must be reasonably available as residue from the process of cutting gem stones I should have thought...
Or is my imagination just leaping way beyond what this stuff would actually look like?
1. They get a super-expensive precious metal, but hide most or all of it from view. You might as well use steel!
2. If it does catch on, you'll find a hundred factories open making knock-offs that do use steel. And it'll be impossible to tell them apart without destroying the jewelry.