Nicedony
3.0" Yooperlite Hand Carved Realistic Skull
3.0" Yooperlite Hand Carved Realistic Skull
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What you are buying
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Natural rough only
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Never dyed or treated
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Carved from one block
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Cut by hand, not moulded
A realistic skull cut from a single block of yooperlite, 3 inches, 316 g.
Yooperlite is a syenite carrying veins of fluorescent sodalite. In daylight it reads as ordinary grey speckled rock; under a UV light those veins glow a hot orange that maps out the internal structure of the stone.
Carving a skull leaves nowhere to hide — the proportions are familiar enough that any error reads immediately. Most of the working time goes into the orbits and the line of the jaw.
Item ID 5100159
Material 100% natural yooperlite
Size 3 × 2 × 2.2 in (75 × 50 × 57 mm)
Weight 316 g
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Ships worldwide. This piece is held at our workshop and ships internationally.
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One of a kind
Every carving is cut from its own block of rough. The photographs on this page show the exact piece you will receive — not a sample from the same batch.
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Natural stone, untreated
100% natural stone, never dyed or reconstituted. Veins, inclusions and small shifts in colour are how the material formed; they are marks of origin rather than faults.
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Carved by hand
Cut, shaped and polished by hand. Proportions differ a little from piece to piece because each one follows the block it came out of.
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Checked and packed
Hand-inspected before dispatch and shipped in shockproof packaging.
Yooperlite — The Hidden Fire
Grey rock in daylight; under ultraviolet light the veins run orange.
Yooperlite is the newest stone in this shop by a wide margin. It was identified in 2017 by Erik Rintamaki along the Lake Superior shoreline in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and named after the Yoopers — what people from that peninsula call themselves. Geologists confirmed it as syenite carrying veins of fluorescent sodalite.
In daylight it reads as unremarkable speckled grey stone. Under a UV torch the sodalite veins glow a hot orange that maps the internal structure. Almost nothing else about a carving changes so completely with the light you point at it.
What Is Not Apparent
The stone is inevitably associated with what goes unnoticed in ordinary conditions, and is kept by people who like that idea more than they like the rock.
Keep a small UV torch beside it; the piece is half of the object.
Where It Comes From
Found on one shoreline in one part of the world, yooperlite carries a specificity most stones do not — it is from somewhere in particular.
Traditionally kept as a marker of a place rather than a property.
New Things Still Exist
Identified in 2017, it is a reminder that the catalogue of ordinary things is not closed.
Show it to someone who thinks everything has already been found.
The Same Object, Twice
Practitioners tend to describe it in terms of the same thing being two things depending on how it is looked at.
Turn the light on and off rather than leaving either state permanent.
Why We Carve Skulls
The skull is the oldest symbol of transformation: what remains, what endures, what is left when everything temporary has gone. Carved in stone it reads less as death and more as clarity.
Turn it to face you when you want to be honest; turn it outward when you want to be left alone.
Cut, not created
We believe a carving should carry the memory of the stone it came from. Every piece is cut from natural material, one at a time, and none of them repeat.