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The Olivia Swirl Tumbler set features hand-blown Mallorcan glass, where two colours of molten glass are twisted together on the blowpipe to create a structural swirl pattern embedded within each piece. The technique, practised in the Balearic Islands for a thousand years, produces a colour effect that shifts with the angle of light. Each tumbler carries natural variation inherent to the hand-blowing process, with the pink swirl sitting within the glass wall rather than applied to the surface.
The swirl in a Mallorcan blown glass is as structural as it is decorative — the natural consequence of two colours of molten glass twisted together on the blowpipe by a hand that knows exactly when to stop turning. Leave it a fraction too long and the swirl tightens into something rigid. Stop a fraction too soon, and it dissolves. The glassblowers of the Balearic Islands have been reading that moment for a thousand years.. JJ first saw this set of 4 on a terrace in Deià, where the afternoon light came through them at an angle that turned the table pink. She has been chasing that particular quality of light on a London dinner table ever since. In the right conditions, she has found, these glasses produce it reliably.
