EFFECTS OF GLITTERING
Glitter is a collection of small objects made up of plastic chunks or sheets, metal foils and synthetic chemicals like titanium dioxide with surface area in the range of about one square millimeter or less and painted with metallic or iridescent paints so as to reflect light. Often the paint has a colour and so the reflected light acquires the specific colour.
The tiny objects are often not perfectly planar but have randomly twistted bends so that each of the surfaces reflect light in the directions suitably conditioned for the reflection to occur.
Some stones are seen to glitter because they have tiny reflecting particles embedded below a transparent layer of the stone near the surface.
The transparent layer also can disperse the light into its component colours to fall on the reflecting surface in slightly different directions; this has the effect of glittering from the same spot in differing colours in different directions. In the artificial glitters also such effects are produced for the desirably rich coloured glittering.
As we have seen, glittering is observed as a result of reflection of light from oriented reflecting surfaces.
The differently coloured rays fall on the culet surfaces cut in very many different directions. The high refractive index causes total internal reflection, sending the rays back to emerge from the gem in several directions causing the observed glittering.
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