We sometimes get questions like “Do you have any in pink?”, “Why are some darker and some lighter?”, or “How can you tell if a gourd is handmade or factory-made?” — so I thought I’d write a quick explanation here.
1. color
Traditional gourds are dyed by boiling them with natural plant dyes. Because of that, the colors are usually limited to red, brown, or black, and they tend to be darker and more muted.
Bright, vivid colors — like bright green or pink — are usually only possible with modern synthetic dyes or spray coatings.
2. uneven color
With traditional dyeing, we can’t exactly control how the color turns out. I never know the final look until after boiling. Once dyeing is done, we only pick the better ones — about 20% of the batch — to move on to the next production step. It’s nearly impossible to achieve the same uniform coloring you see in mass-produced factory pieces
3. Handmade or Factory-Made?
Honestly, most people need a bit of patience to tell the difference.
Factory-made gourds usually have very rich, uniform colors, because they use synthetic dyes, so almost any color can be achieved. The colors also tend to look very consistent and bright.
They often use a very uniform type of gourd as well. The downside is that this kind of gourd usually has a thinner shell and is more fragile, so here it’s mostly used for decorative purposes rather than daily use.
We’re just a very small workshop. We can’t really make gourd bottles in large quantities, and we only like making pieces that we’d genuinely want to use ourselves.
