A piece of glass that has, by our reckoning, made every silicone toy in our drawers obsolete — and the four pieces of reporting we filed around it.
A confession about silicone fatigue, the dead-clit problem, and the one object I'm not getting rid of.
Read the essay →
The anatomy, the location, the 12 o'clock technique, the role of temperature, and the tools that do the work.
A six-dimension comparative audit of every major hand-blown borosilicate piece on the market.
An editor's curated guide to the twenty-one most beautifully designed pleasure objects on the market.
A husband's account of getting the gift wrong, going down a research rabbit hole, and finding the small Dutch object that fixed it.
When we started Lustre Journal, in 2023, the running joke in our office was that we were a magazine about candles. Then it was a magazine about ceramics. Then about lamps. We could never quite agree on what the brief was.
Two years and seventeen issues in, the brief has clarified itself. We are a magazine about the things on the shelf — the objects that someone, somewhere, thought worth designing carefully and pricing honestly. The objects that earn their place not by hiding in drawers but by living in plain view, surviving the casual question of a houseguest, and outlasting the season's trend cycle.
This issue's centrepiece is, frankly, a piece of glass — one specific piece, hand-blown in the Netherlands, that our writers have circled around for eleven months and finally agreed deserved an issue's worth of attention. The four supporting pieces are our attempt to answer, from four different angles, the same question: what makes an object worth keeping?
The answers, as you'll see, are mostly about weight and temperature. Which is, when you think about it, mostly about how an object meets the body that uses it.
— The Editors