Collecting Bottled Beaches
By Rusti Stover
Elafonissi Beach, Crete, Greece (Stefano Zaccaria/Shutterstock.com).
It all started with a revelation that came to me in the 1990s. My late husband, a retired Navy Flyboy, wanted to visit the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, Florida, where he had spent service time, so we headed out from Houston for my first trip to that coastal state. Having been a casual beachcomber most of my life—picking up rounded fossil Petoskey stones and beach glass on the Michigan shores I knew growing up and adding seashells from the shores of the Texas coast when we moved there—the prospect of finding different shells and sea glass on Florida shores was exciting.
Pensacola Beach (Sonja Filitz/Shutterstock.com).
As we drove into Pensacola, I noticed sandy stretches with bright white dunes on the right side of the road and remarked on the sand’s distinct color. We stopped and walked the beach, picking up tiny pink scallop shells that spangled the sugary soft, tiny pure white granules of this very different sand that sparkled in the Florida sun. Amazed at the uniqueness of it, I scooped some into a plastic bag I had brought along for the shells. That was the first deliberately collected specimen of my vast, worldwide sand collection. From that point forward, it was not only shells and beach glass from all the places we visited that came home with us, but also small zipper-seal plastic bags filled with different sands, with location data on pieces of paper in each bag.
Sands for Lagos, Nigeria (Rusti Stover).
Once home, I told some of my shell club friends and my Michigan relatives about this new fascination, and they began to bring or send me sand specimens of an ounce or two from places they traveled. Luckily for me, a lot of my friends in Houston and other shell clubs had jobs connected to the oil industry, which enabled them to travel to many places that were out of my budget; I asked them for help with my new hobby, and to not only think of beaches for sand specimens, but deserts and rivers and lakes, which my online research showed had different sand textures and colors. It wasn’t long before the specimens started to accumulate.
Fast forward 30 years, and my spreadsheet of collected sands numbers almost 740 worldwide specimens to date. Being a bit of a nerd, I use the spreadsheet to record more data than the jar labels show. Besides an alphabetical list of locations by state, country or island name, the columns contain a description of each sand’s color and texture, who gave it to me, or if it was self-collected.
Sand collection (Rusti Stover).
I had jarred up around 500 sands in small glass bottles and different styles of vintage spice jars that were bought at thrift stores over many years before the pandemic hit in 2020. That captive first year at home made me notice how much of my hobby room surfaces were covered with these, and it looked very messy. It seemed this was now the time to organize it all. Many hours of that year were spent tediously converting the mismatched mess into standard, tube-shaped jars in one-ounce and half-ounce sizes that I had found on an online site for lab equipment supplies. The clear glass vials all have black screw caps and new matching labels, and they store easily in clear plastic boxes labeled by state, foreign country, or islands, so I can find a single sand jar in a short time if needed.
Texas sands (Rusti Stover).
There are still a few special larger jars of “bottled beaches” that contain seashells from the sites on top of the sand, or are interesting vintage ones, such as a heavy glass marine light cover, upside-down with a vintage zinc mason jar lid screwed on the bottom. Another one is snow-globe shaped, with shells in the sand that rise when shaken; it’s an actual “beach ball.” There is also a pyramid-shaped jar filled with desert sand from in front of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt, that a British shell book author friend of mine sent me from when he went there; it just seems it belongs in that jar. Certain sands just cried out to stay in the decorative jars, and they also break up the monotony of the bulk of the collection.
Kodiak Alaska Beach (Jeremy W Moore/Shutterstock.com). Australian Outback (kawhia/Shutterstock.com).White Sands National Park in New Mexico (Zack Frank/Shutterstock.com).
Horseshoe Bay, Bermuda (Colac Catalin/Shutterstock.com)
The color of that Pensacola sand is what spurred this desire (obsession?) to fill my world with as many examples as I could amass. The “sand color rainbow” includes black (Hawaii, Alaska, and other volcanic areas); white (Florida, White Sands New Mexico); pink (Bermuda and many other Caribbean islands); red (Texas, Australia, and many southwestern USA locations); green (some Irish beaches and one in Hawaii); and many shades of brown, tan, and beige.
Colored sands at Alum Bay, Isle of Wight (Lisa Brazier/Shutterstock.com). Alum Bay sands (Rusti Stover).
In fact, another British friend sent me a package of a dozen different colors of sand from a single location: the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom, which has a cliffside shore famous for all its different mineral sands and their colors, all in vertical stripes right next to each other. There are a few golden-yellow and gray sands in that group, also.
Hawaiian sands (Rusti Stover). Papakolea Beach (Eric Dale/Shutterstock.com).
Sand collectors run the gamut from being casual collectors with a few pretty jars of different sands, to becoming a member of the International Sand Collectors Society and being really into the technical and scientific details of sand. I am somewhere in between, enjoying giving talks and PowerPoint presentations about my sands locally to senior groups and others, while studying my collection by reading books about sand and finding online blogs on the subject. There is a level of interest to suit everyone.
Collectors of sand are called arenophiles, which means someone who collects and studies sand specimens as a hobby and is interested in the variety of sand’s color, texture, mineralogy and place of origin. The word comes from the Latin word arena, which means “sand.” Sand itself is defined by size, being “finer than gravel and coarser than silt.”
Star sand (koi88/Shutterstock.com). Right: Star sand from Iriomote Island (Renata Barbarino/Shutterstock.com).
Many different substances make up sand grains from all over the Earth, including small seashell particles, coral rubble, foraminifera skeletons such as the star-shaped sand grains from a beach in Okinawa, Japan and the birdseed-shaped foram sand from the island of Bali. These are called “organic” sands.
Red sands of the world (Rusti Stover). Washington State sand and the matrix it came from (Rusti Stover).
There are also “gem sands” filled with very tiny precious and semiprecious stones such as garnets (Australia), peridot (an olivine beach in Hawaii), and rubies, sapphires, and even diamonds. These are called “placer sands,” and help geologists find mineral deposits and also aid in gold mining.
Dead Sea coastline at sunset(NickolayV/Shutterstock.com). Coronado Beach(Bill Chizek/Shutterstock.com).
“Mineral sands” include the white silica (quartzite) sands that are used in making glass, such as the Pensacola sand; the beige-white mineral gypsum, like White Sands, New Mexico, which is also the world’s largest gypsum dune field; feldspar sand, and all kinds of igneous and sedimentary rocks that have been worn down by wave and wind action over millennia. My collection also has two sands that are completely composed of salt granules: the Great Salt Lake, Utah, and the Dead Sea, Jordan.
Another mineral substance found in many sands is mica, and some beach sands that are heavily filled with these flat, flaky, glitter-like particles sparkle in the sunlight like they are covered in sequins. One such famous mica-laden beach is that of Coronado Island off the San Diego, California coast; at sunset, it is a spectacle people flock to see.
Glass Beach, Fort Bragg, California (Felix Nendzig/Shutterstock.com).
Amongst my unusual sands, I’d be remiss not to mention a favorite larger jar that has appeal to beach glass collectors. It’s completely composed of small, rounded pieces of sea glass which came from Glass Beach, Kauai, Hawaii, but I know there are other “sea glass” beaches in the world, so more may find their way into my collection someday.
Fracking sand (Video Arts Studios/Shutterstock.com).
My collection includes a few “industrial” sands. I recently sent away to a fracking sand company for a sample of their sand that is used to extract oil from shale underground; one quarry where this sand is mined is in Marshfield, Wisconsin, and they obliged. The grains of this light beige sand are all round, uniformly sized particles. One that I call a “silly sand” came from a brother-in-law who buys black carbide and white silica industrial sands at a hardware store for his craft of sand blasting designs on glass, and he thought, with a chuckle, to send me samples of those. Of course, they were added.
I hope might inspire a new crop of arenophiles to take a closer look and marvel at the sand itself, while plucking their collectibles from the beaches of the world.
Learn more arenophiles and sand collecting.
Learn about sands from around the world, what makes up different sand types, and the arenophiles and artists who collect sands and use it in their art. Articles›
This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 48 May/June 2025.
