Vintage Japanese Millefiori Glass Beads: 1000 Flowers in Handcrafted Jewelry

If you've ever seen them up close, you know that vintage Japanese glass beads made with a millefiori "thousand flowers" pattern are exquisite - intricate, with vivid hues and delightful coloration. These artisan beads have an abstract floral-like design - sometimes actual flowers, other times just swirls of shapes in beautiful colors.

As far as I know, the beads are handmade and each one is truly original. When I was making jewelry to sell, I bought a few small lots of vintage Japanese millefiori glass beads off of eBay, and have loved working with them.

Up close, they lived up to their photographs - in fact, the ones I got surpasssed the photos. They are that beautiful, made with fine craftsmanship. They have a moderate sized bead hole (neither too small nor too large), and looking at them, it's obvious they were made to exacting standards.

My understanding is that the beads I bought were made in the latter half of the 20th century. They are too young to be called "antique," so I call them "vintage," and that is how they are commonly marketed.

I've been trying to find out how these beads are made. In frustration I watch my husband, who uses Japanese hand tools and reads some Japanese, have no trouble finding information on his craft online, while I'm futilely searching the world to find out anything about these beads. But their provenance is hard to trace, especially as I neither read nor speak Japanese.

Now, I know how millefiori is made - colored rods of glass are fused together to form patterns and sliced to reveal the shapes made by the rods.

Millefiori or Hand Painted?

However, the Japanese vintage beads marketed as millefiori that I bought are definitely glass, but I'm not sure they're true millefiori - or at least, not all of them. The most beautiful were handpainted and had an opaque rather than translucent surface. They didn't have the appearance of depth that millefiori does (remember those colorful glass paperweights of the 1980s that looked like flowers in water?)

I think perhaps some of the eBay beads are millefiori style rather than true millefiori. You should be able to tell the difference by the photographs. My personal preference is to buy the kind I bought already - the opaque painted beads whose surfaces were designed very finely.

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