The customary sources of information on the web (here’s looking at you Wikipedia) talk about most metallic elements with droning sameness and lack of nuance. You’d be hard-pressed to find one that doesn’t use silver as an adjective for its color. For the longest time I figured this was due to laziness or the ennui born of being tasked to describe many lookalike things but, to me, inexcusable all the same for a professional writer.

It wasn’t until much later on that it dawned on me that these lackluster descriptions were probably the result of simply being unfamiliar with the stuff they were writing about. They were simply quoting the same old references over and over and paraphrasing pitifully dry, academic accounts of long-dead chemists.

What has any of this soapbox to do with nickel? Well, its color for one is most definitely not silvery. Hell, ‘silvery’ isn’t even a good way to describe silver itself! That metal looks fresh and bright and reflective when polished and free of any tarnish but real-world silver, the type that might be in the hand-me-down cutlery that only gets used on special occasions or mid-grade jewelry, looks duller, like old coins. Nickel, too, has a color that varies. Impure nickel, anything below about 99.5%, is an ordinary steel gray with no discernible hues. When very pure, however, it has a distinct brownish tone that is immediately obvious when placed next to a true neutral gray like, er… freshly polished silver.

Another salient feature of nickel is its exceptional hardness for a pure metal. When it comes to hardness - here interpreted in the more colloquial sense of being hard to bend, to cut and wear down - alloys are where it’s at because a little of this and a little of that end up a better profile but nickel comes damn close all on its own. Plus it’s quite resistant chemically. It is, however, considerably more expensive than steel (which is mostly iron) so it ends up being used as haute accents in metalwork rather than structural beams and ocean liners.

This ampule contains the purest grade of nickel available commercially, 99.95%. It comes as pellets not because Luciteria specifically commissions its manufacture this way but because this is exactly what you get if you’re, say, a steel mill and need to toss a few buckets’ worth into a furnace. Higher grades of nickel are possible but the cost goes up very quickly. For example, 5N nickel (99.999%), just a tiny bit purer than this, costs 15 times more. Then, with 6N and up you get to the “write us first and let us know what kind of budget you have” level where even a modest order will justify the sales office throwing a party.

This here? Eight bucks and you get a little change back even!