For many years, I traveled the country as a sea glass educator, doing lectures, sea glass identification and judging festivals coast to coast. I used to do up to 10 shows a year and now am basically retired from this industry, appearing only at the local Eastern Shore Sea Glass and Coastal Arts Festival nearby where I live in Maryland. It’s a niche expertise, gleaned from years of learning working beside the world’s leading sea glass author and expert who also lives in Maryland. For a while I ran a nonprofit and beachcombing museum that had to close due to an ill-timed Covid launch and the economy.
In my 20 years in this industry, I observed and learned many things and in finding more time in semi-retirement am working to finish a book about it. Something that comes up often and once again recently: genuine versus fake sea glass. If there are popular recurrent controversial topics in sea glass, they would be this one and beach locations: some think they should be shared, some don’t.
One reason people fight is that real glass is becoming harder to find on the beach. If you want to find genuine sea glass, I’ll tell you where it is: don’t bother looking on the beach—it’s sitting in auction and selling pages on Facebook for sale. You just have to be able to tell the difference from all the fake glass that’s also for sale online. Most of that is on eBay, Etsy and Amazon, but some of it’s sold online by people who pretend to be sea glass aficionados but are scammers. But after many years of experience, I pretty much always know the difference between genuine and fake glass.
I’ve been put in a number of uncomfortable positions at shows with vendors, attendees and on social media, asked to discern fake glass where people would ask “Don’t you know this person?” and I’d say, “I can’t say anything about where you got this piece, I can only tell you whether it’s real or not.” Multiple times over the years collectors have had to remove fake pieces from tables after my identification. And I’ve also yielded countless messages from individuals who haven’t received orders from a vendor and felt badly for them but had to explain that just because I know someone it doesn’t mean I can intervene in a business transaction.
I stepped away from the industry because the priorities were changing. My goal and interest was a passion for researching finds, provenance, history and education. Speaking with many people who have a working legacy knowledge of this industry and have the same values validated that those ideals are rarely the overall focus now. Although there are many talented jewelers to take care to source genuine glass, many in the industry now seem less interested in guardrails against fake glass and are more interested in greed, social media following and likes, and spending time on petty Facebook drama.
I try not to look back with regret. I treasure the sea glass festivals where I met tens of thousands of people; many brought me their little zip-lock bags of treasure and I was able to look up on my phone and show them the depression-era teacup that one pretty piece may have once belonged to, or gifted a beach-found marble to a kid (of any age) who said they’d always wanted to find one.
As for the back-stabbing, hurtful, miserable people ripping customers off by selling fake glass or blowing up beach locations, driving people insane all across the globe? We can’t waste time harboring resentment or anger. Energy is too precious to waste on the wrong people. I’m a Gemini like Kendrick so I have that Super Bowl halftime @Drake smile on tap all day and will always know the difference between genuine and fake.
