Glow bracelets are essentially 8-inch long glowsticks 5 or 6mm diameter wide. After being activated, two ends of the glowing sticks can be connected with plastic connectors to form a small loop to create glowing bracelets. Glow bracelets have been party favors all around the world, used in birthday parties, dancing parties, Mardi Gras, July 4th, proms, Halloween’s, parade, camping, glow in the dark office parties and many more. Glow bracelets are used as jewelry wears most of the time, but do you know you can also create glowie toys with them? For example, you can create a glowing ball with a few bracelets and glowing ball connectors. You can also use your imagination to create your own geometric glowie designs.

Glowing bracelets generate light through chemical reactions and produce no heat, flame, or sparks. They are safe toys for outdoor activities such as camping, night golfing etc. Not only do they add a lot of fun, but also provide safety by lighting up the players at night. A glowing bracelet comes in many wonderful colors such as green, yellow, red, pink, orange, purple, blue and white. You can also get an assortment of the solid colors. There are also tri-color glowie bracelets such as green-yellow-pink and red-green-blue and red-white-blue, especially popular for July 4th. A quality glow bracelet can last 6-8 hours, long enough for a whole night’s fun. And due to their small size, glowie bracelets are inexpensive and affordable. For 100 pieces of tri-color or assorted color bracelets, you can get them for a little over $10 and for large quantity, discount would apply. The shelf life of these bracelets is 1 year if kept in original packages in room temperature. So if you have more than one night events in a year where you need these fun bracelets, it would make economic sense to purchase glowing bracelets in a wholesale order.

Opals are quite fragile in relation to some of the other gemstones. On Mohs hardness scale, developed by Frederich Mohs, it rates about 5.5 to 6.5. To put that into perspective the lead in pencil rates about 1 since it is so soft and diamond rates at 10 which is the hardest. This means that opal gemstones do need to be looked after and you do not want to wear them when they might get scratched like doing the gardening or other manual work. This applies to all opal gemstones including ones such as fire opal jewelry. You may think that rings would be stronger but the gem itself such as in a black opal ring could still get scratched.

Opal gemstones contain a lot of water content which can be up to 21% but more usually is around 10% for precious gemstones. This means that they do not like exposure to prolonged heat or low humidity since it will dry them out and may cause cracking called crazing. Make sure you avoid rapid temperature changes for the same reason.

To clean your opal gemstones it does depend on what type of opal it is. If it is a solid opal then you can soak it in warm water with a little detergent without any worries and then wipe it with a soft cloth. If you have opal doublets or triplets then you do not want to soak it in water since that may affect the glue between the layers. If water gets in between the layers then it can give the opals a foggy appearance. Doublets and triplets can be cleaned with a soft cloth but make sure it is soft so that the gemstones do not get scratched.

To store your opal gemstones keep them away from other jewelry since gems such as diamonds can scratch them. If your gemstones are going to be put away for a long period put them in a plastic bag with a damp cotton wool ball and then seal the plastic bag. This should keep the air moist enough to keep them from crazing. If the opals are only going to put away for a short period then putting them in a soft bag away from other jewelry should be fine.