Enamel Pins 101: All About Glitter!

Yeah Baby, Give Me That Sparkly Stuff!

One of our most popular add-ons (for obvious reasons, because it’s awesome) is GLITTER! 

Glitter can be added onto hard or soft enamel pins, and comes in a variety of solid colors as well as a translucent, iridescent “rainbow” shade that works well on most enamel colors. But there are a few things to keep in mind, when planning your sparkly masterpiece:

• Glitter colors are custom mixed, to work well with whatever Pantone color you’re using. There are actually only about 14 colors (plus the iridescent “rainbow” mix) which are mixed by hand to approximate the color of the enamel you’re using. This means that, between batches, your glitter might look a little different since it’s being mixed on a different day and possibly by a different person.  It also requires you to have some flex on the final tone.  If you want Pantone 285 C with blue glitter in it, it will not exactly match 285 C anymore, but it will be as close as possible.  

• Expect glitter to add a few days to the production time, especially if there are multiple colors. All that mixing takes some time.
• If you’ve got a reference photo of what you want your glitter to look like, send it along! The factory will do their best to match it. 
• Pure black and pure white glitter will pretty much disappear completely when used in hard enamel (and it’s subtle in soft enamel too). To solve this problem, we can add some silver or iridescent rainbow glitter to the mix. 

• Glitter is messy! In soft enamel pins, the finished product may shed a few flakes. It’s not a big deal, but can be avoided by using hard enamel or adding an epoxy top coat. It also means that a stray flake of glitter in the wrong color may end up somewhere it doesn’t belong, especially in a pin with multiple glitter colors. That’s just the nature of the sparkly beast.  If you have used glitter at some point in your life, you know what I mean- it has a mind of its own! If a stray flake is on soft enamel, you can normally pick it off really easily.
  
  

• Glitter adds $25 per color, per 100 pins, which means adding a shot of glitter to your design is pretty affordable… but it can add up fast if you want a lot of colors. Consider subscribing to a “less is more” policy with glitter. Maybe, for example, your unicorn pin could have a single-colored glittery body, instead of 7 glittery rainbow colors in his mane and tail? (Then again- you do you, you fabulous creature!).  Because glitter is priced from the labor of mixing/extra time they take, even if you do only 50, it is billed the same as 100.  In the case of the 7 glitter rainbow sparkly unicorn, on 100 pins, it would add $175!  We can go full bling if you want and don’t mind the additional cost. Glitter is added to each color one at a time, so it takes a decent amount of additional labor to add multiple colors - as well as curing time between colors.
  
  One solution we now offer is to use the rainbow iridescent glitter for all of your colors (or all the colors you want sparkly, anyway!) To do that, it only costs $50 to sparkle up as much of your pin as you please. Rainbow looks especially fantastic on pale colors as well as cooler tones like blues and greens. 

Translucent rainbow glitter is used in every color on this pin

• Want that “starry night” look? We’ve found that doing 50% pure black glitter and 50% rainbow iridescent glitter looks amazing on a black background. We can also do other 50/50 mixes of two colors, so hit us with your twinkly brainstorms! 
  
  

Lowering the density of rainbow glitter in black enamel can make a gorgeous starry effect! The exact results will depend on the human mixing glitter that day, but it's always beautiful, especially in hard enamel.