Vaseline Trade Beads Silver Necklace N763

Marie Curie lived in a time when women were supposed to stay home in the kitchen and make babies.  But she had other ideas. Together with her husband Pierre, they discovered radium.  It’s a powerful element of chemistry, and its discovery gave her a Nobel prize.  This piece was made for my Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman exhibition.

These glorious beads were made in the early 1800’s using uranium, a by product of radium, that was “vitrified” – trapped in glass” to make glass glow under certain lights.  She m ay have died from Radium poisoning, but according to the US Department of Nuclear Science, these are absolutely harmless and have less harmful elements in them than your mobile phone, glued to your ear.   I’ve mixed them with silver pendants from india with a bull – as Marie was probably a bull in a China shop when it came to making scientific waves – and sterling silver beads.