Loetz Olympia, PN II-75, ca. 1900 - Pure and Simple

I like to eat healthy, but every once in a while I love a good bowl of ice cream. I don't mean ice cream full of mix-ins, nuts, fruit, chocolate sauce, or caramel - I mean just plain, good old, vanilla ice cream. Back in the 1980s, Häagen-Dazs had a flavor called honey vanilla, and it was everything I loved about ice cream - smooth, sweet, and creamy. You could taste the quality of each ingredient in every spoonful. You could just let it melt on your tongue and savor the pure goodness of it. Alas, they retired the flavor in 1989, and I've been searching for a suitable replacement ever since.

The reason I tell this story is that sometimes I find a piece of glass that evokes the same emotional response within me. Olympia is not exciting, as Loetz decors go - It's pure "coke-bottle" green, and it reacts weakly to UV light. Put it on a Loetz form, though - thrown in a few optic panels, and you get this - a little iridescent cabinet vase that basks in its simplicity, and in its quality. In your hand, you can appreciate its tactile and optical qualities, and look closely at its uniform iridescence, and you know it's something good, even if it doesn't exactly stack up to those fancy Phänomen genre and Ausführungen pieces. But, for the price of a few pints of Häagen-Dazs, I got a nice little cabinet vase that has survived intact for over one hundred years, is every bit as sweet, and won't melt or make me fat.