You wander around Tasmania. #YouFindARock. It’s unmistakably red lead. You reach out.
It’s red lead. But sparkly!
You know better.
And yet...
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You appreciate its nearly-adamantine sparkle.
Even knowing it’s a bad idea, your fingers lightly dance across crystal faces, barely detecting delicate striations while careful not to snap the fragile forms.
You lick your fingers.
Mmm, danger tastes bittersweet! Literally.
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Growing braver, you heft the rock.
“Aren’t you the heavy ones?” you purr at it, delighted the density of chromium and leaf combine to a specific gravity of 6ish. “So solid! You really feel like a rock, nice and weighty for your size.”
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Realizing that chromium and lead both present significant heath risks and YOU SHOULD NEVER LICK CROCOITE, you wash your hands after handling the mineral.
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You take one last moment to appreciate the delicate beauty of the fragile, sparkly needles, then SMASH IT.
It shatters, the largest fragments demonstrating concoidal fracture when it isn’t reduced to a fine red-orange powder.
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“Lead AND hexavalent chromium?” you muse, mixing the powder vigorously into a base. “What could possibly go wrong.”
You’ve successfully transformed a beautiful crystal into a pigment that is compositionally identical to synthetic chrome yellow, aka school bus paint. 🚌
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“Government subsidies on bright yellow toxic teacups of doom makes more sense than most American public policy right now,” you reason, hustling for those sweet, sweet glaze grants.
You dive in to a maze of paperwork, tendor forms, and procurement bidding, pretty rock forgotten.
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