Abalone Shells New Zealand

A polished New Zealand paua shell, five to six inches across. This is the one people mean when they say abalone shells are beautiful: Haliotis iris, the blackfoot paua, which tends to run to deeper blues and purples than the Mexican shells do. It is four dollars more and the difference is visible across a room.

Paua is a taonga, a treasured thing, in Maori tradition. The shell has been worked into fishing lures, set into cloaks, and used as inlay in carving, most famously as the eyes of the figures, which is the detail you notice first in a meeting house. Tangaroa, god of the sea, is said to have made the shell out of the coolest blues in the ocean.

It also comes with a paper trail, which almost nothing natural on our shelves does. New Zealand put paua into its Quota Management System in 1986. The commercial catch is capped, the fishery is split into regional quota areas, and the industry councils routinely land under their own limit. For four dollars more, that is part of what you are buying.

The color is structural, not pigment. The inside of the shell is nacre, built from microscopic aragonite platelets stacked in layers roughly the thickness of a wavelength of light, so the light bouncing off successive layers interferes with itself and comes back split into color. Tilt it and the colors move, because the angle changed. That is also why a burn mark is permanent: heat wrecks the stack.

Good to Know

5 to 6 inches. Natural product, so color and shape vary piece to piece and the photograph is a representation. Put a layer of sand in the bottom before you burn anything in it. The shell is calcium carbonate and it will scorch, and once the nacre has taken heat the color is gone from that patch for good. Sand takes the heat instead and it also lets you stub a stick out cleanly. Rinse and dry it if it gets ashy. Keep it off a hot sunny sill too, not because the color fades (structural color has no pigment to fade) but because sustained heat dries the nacre out and cracks it.

Try It With

A palo santo stick at four dollars, or a sweetgrass braid at five. The Mexican abalone is the cheaper one if the color is not the point. More in burnables.