I have a new hobby – collecting sea glass (weathered glass pieces that has been in the sea for years or even hundred of years)…

Unfortunately finding beautiful, colourful pieces is much harder than I thought, at least here in UK.

I’ve done some research to find out what colours are the most common and it seems that the rarity chart for UK looks more or less like this (with some minor local differences), starting with the most precious ones:

Very Rare

• multicoloured
• purple
• deep yellow
• orange
• red (often textured, from old boat lights before plastic was in use)
• black (with addition of iron slag for strength, antique sea glass, hundreds of years old, they appear to be black but when held against the light will have dark green, olive, brown or cobalt blue hue)

Rare

• pink / cotton candy
• peach
• pale yellow
• turquoise
• teal
• cornflower blue / light blue
• lavender / amethyst (from clear bottles exposed to UV)
• cobalt blue (from old medicine bottles)
• aquamarine
• grey

Fairy Common

• milk glass (milky pastels, opaque colours)
• light brown / amber / honey brown
• dark green (from old medicine, liquor bottles)
• citron / olive green (wine bottles)
• light green (wine bottles)
• pale greenish blue / seafoam (from original Coca-cola and other soft drink bottles)

Most Common

• dark brown (common but really hard to spot)
• white / clear
• bottle green / lime green

So far I have been lucky to find:

• lime / bottle green x 302
• clear / white x 130
• seafoam x 78
• light green x 33
• dark green x 29
• citron / olive green x 21
• light brown / amber x 8
• teal x 7
• amethyst / lavender x 2
• black x 2
• cobalt blue x 1

I’m writing this down to show percentage of lime / bottle green pieces over others. It is because they are easier to spot, dark brown and white / clear pieces are probably as common but very hard to spot on beaches, especially those with stones.