Which Sea Glass Color is Rarest?

Sea Glass Rarity by Color Explained...

I was always a water baby… get me near water and I was in it in a flash – gave my poor mother quite a few scares as a toddler, but that’s another story. 

Fifty years later, nothing’s changed; I’m still an ocean girl at heart. I’ve always loved walking the beach… and if I happen to discover sea glass at my feet, all the better! There’s no fonder memory I have than of early summer days in 1976, exploring sea glass beach in North California for the first time, discovering frosted shard after frosted shard.

The Aquas and Seafoams were always my special finds, but I had a place in my heart for all the sea glass colors, a love that, like my love of the sea, has also remained unchanged.

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Back in the day, there was a general rule to sea glass rarity that everyone pretty much agreed on: Red and blue; rare, brown and clear; not as much. But this was decades before anyone thought of “codifying” sea glass colors.

Today, sea glass is more popular than ever, yet rarer than ever. And collectors line up to debate whether turquoise is rarer than red or the other way ‘round?

How about teal?

Should dove gray precede olive black or succeed it in the rarity rankings?

Trust me, among sea glass people, the struggle is real…

All these questions seem to sometimes cultivate debates rather than answers, so I take a different approach. At the Real Sea Glass studios I group the colors of sea glass by degrees of rarity based on more than forty years of hunting and collecting, and the hunting and collecting efforts of my 15 sea glass hunters. I have the rewards of 40 years of sea glass hunting and collecting in my Florida studio.

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I’ve found that subtle variances in the amount of one color of sea glass found compared to another depend on the beach. There is no universal measure of rarity that applies to sea glass found on each and every sea glass beach the world over…

While rare colors are always rare, given enough time hunting, you may find more red than turquoise, for example. It just depends on the beach you’re visiting. And this is where answering the question "Which color of sea glass is rarest?" gets tricky. My solution: grouping sea glass into "rarity families." While you may find more lime green on one beach, or more cornflower blue on another, they are both rare, so they are grouped into the "Rare" family.

And this system is what inspired the creation of the Real Sea Glass Rarity Chart. Here, you will find the colors grouped by rarity family, but not put in a 1, 2, 3 order as slight regional variances in the numbers of one color found compared to another will almost always occur.

So instead of telling you whether turquoise or red is rarer (it’s turquoise...just couldn’t help myself), I’ll say each group is represented by a degree of rarity. Don’t get caught up in one color being more to the right or left in a grouping, - remember, it all depends on your beach!

And if we’re truly looking at the bigger picture, while it’s fun to discover those rare colors, no matter where your sea glass appears on the Real Sea Glass Rarity Chart, sea glass is a vanishing treasure that makes every color a Bit of the Beach to be treasured.

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For more on Sea Glass Rarity, Grading and Value, click here>>>