Test Results :: Rubino Oro

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 6 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 7 & 8 - w/ Tuxedo, Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace

Effetre Rubino Oro is a rich, medium to dark pink transparent colour, and is extremely reactive. It's a striking colour, which means that it is generally clear when first melted, and then strikes to its rich, pink hue through repeated heating and cooling.

Rubino Oro is a colour that is persnickety about how much heat it gets and how oxygenated the flame is that it is heated in. Too little oxygen can result in the Rubino Oro getting ugly, dark streaks in it. Too much heat can result in the colour getting burnt out  of it.

I have read reports that Rubino Oro does not like to be encased and can cause cracking, however I did not experience that problem with my particular batch of it. I did find that my batch was sort of streaky though, and that the colour is not very uniform. This is most visible in my first plain spacer in the picture above, and on the quint-coloured bead that has the Rubino Oro stringer decoration on top of it.

Reducing Rubino Oro results in a dark grey-pink shiny patina developing on the surface of the bead.

Silver leaf on top of Rubino Oro turns dark grey and a strange mustardy brown. When the silver is reduced and encased, this effect lightens considerably and the silver develops pinkish patches and odd green halo effects. The reaction is actually sort of attractive, if you can get the silver to uniformly cover the Rubino before reducing and encasing it (which I didn't).

Rubino Oro is not particularly attractive with reducing silver glass frit. You can see here that it has leeched most of the colour out of my frit blend and turned a yucky brownish colour around the edges. I think that it's the reduction that causes this, because the silver glass frit in the bead on the right (unreduced TerraNova2) is far more attractive. I didn't do my frit stringer test with Rubino Oro, which now seems like a sort of giant oversight. I guess I can put it on the huge, growing to-do list.

Rubino Oro brought out very nice colour in the TN2 frit, and seems to make a pretty good base for striking silver glass.

Tuxedo didn't really seem to react with the Rubino Oro or vice versa, but it is the exception, not the rule.

Rubino caused my Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace to separate when I used those colours on top of it to make stringer dots and lines. In addition to separating Ivory, Rubino also turns it brown.

Using Copper Green and Opal Yellow underneath Rubino Oro stringer dots and lines caused the base glass to pop up in halos around the Rubino. I love this effect. It is extra weird in the Opal Yellow because the Opal Yellow changes the colour of Rubino Oro from pink to orange. I didn't get the same kind of popping halo effect with Peace, which sort of surprised me.

On top of Ivory, Rubino Oro is just sort of a smeary brown mess.

Here is a bead where I layered Rubino Oro over Ivory as the bead base colours. I'm not sure how I feel about it, but it definitely has provided some contrast.