Double Helix Oracle743.opl is a semi-opaque white moonstone colour from Double Helix's technical glass line. It's fascinating glass. Repeated heating and cooling will turn it an opaque white, but you can reset the opacity to moonstone just by getting it super-hot again.
This colour is really nice to work with, not bubbling in the least. The rods look like they are full of bubbles before you start using them, but work up smooth and buttery.
Here, you can see that in the bead on the left, the colour has stayed semi-opaque but in the bead on the right that I reduced, the colour is much more opaque. This is not specific to the reduction flame, just the gentle reheating it got when I wafted it through.
I thought I would compare this colour to the only two other white semi-opaques I had on hand, CiM Marshmallow and CiM Cirrus. I don't have any of the Effetre White Alabaster because I am officially terrified of the alabasters, and I've never tried the Effetre White Opalino.
It is interesting to me how many different 'kinds' of semi-opaque there are. You can see here that Oracle743.opl is a bit warmer of a white than the brightness of Marshmallow, and softer. In person, you can also see some translucency in it. The Marshmallow, on the other hand, has gone quite opaque. Cirrus, the other colour I tested here is a wispy transparent that got a little more opacity as I worked it, but stayed mostly transparent.
I thought that Oracle743.opl was a bright white, but it is really more of an off white.
Here I've compared the Oracle743.opl to two of the other colours I'm testing right now. You can really see the beautiful opalescence of this colour in this photo.
This colour's reactions are very similar to the reactions that I get with most whites, although they are a little gentler. Silver turns a pinkish yellow colour on its surface. When the silver is reduced and encased it goes whiteish, but still shows a little pink and has a dirty yellowish crust in places.
Reducing silver glass on this colour turned it yellow, and I got a better-than-average starting strike on top of this colour with my TerraNova2 frit which makes me think it might make a nice base for striking silver glass on. More experimentation required.
This colour is beautifully unreactive.
Most of the other colours (not Tuxedo) that I used on top of it spread, just as they generally do on top of transparents.
To make this colour, I mixed Oracle743.opl and Double Helix Lotis in a 1:1 ratio. I quite like the pretty semi-opaque pink that resulted.
Here are some 'just for fun' beads using Oracle743.opl.
The next two beads use the colour I blended from Oracle743.opl and Lotis.
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