What is Dichrolam?

Black Sea Burl knife handle

Dichrolam® is the brainchild of furniture designer turned chemist, John Blazy.

From his earliest days in furniture design, John has been fascinated by the optical qualities of the rarest inlay and accent materials such as Abalone, Opal and dichroic glass. But the price, size and fabrication limitations were often impossible to overcome. So, was there a solution for a man made equivalent?

Countless hours of study, research, trial and error, and divine blessing, over a period of twenty years, went into the product development for what we now call Dichrolam. The flagship Burl Textures line involves hand patterned dichroic films combined with hard resins. As you can see, they are actually more vibrant and colorful than traditional Abalone or Opal materials, are significantly more cost effective, and can be produced in sheet stock of ranging sizes and thicknesses.

The optical core is HIGHLY saturated with color, and patterned by hand, to reproduce the patterns of Carpathian Elm Burl merged into Australian Black Opal.

The patterning techniques took years of experimentation and hundreds of iterations to master, and have the ability to enhance the vibrant colors within the 3 dimensional swirling burl texture – creating a core layer that is not metal, but magically reflects color which transitions at different viewing angles, a thin film physics quality known as dichroism.

You can explore our Burl Lines in more detail here.

Or venture out to learn about our other product lines including our Layered Composites and our Impressed Textured panels.