Despite the Rare Earth metals group being hotly pursued the world over, the few applications where erbium outperforms other elements - lasers, glass coloring, fiber optics - need relatively little of it. This leaves it a bit of an orphan and pushes down its cost. You wouldn’t guess this from looking at the price tag of one of these domes though. There is a simple reason for this and it has to do with purity. Much of the erbium that is retrieved in the early stages of refining the lanthanides ores is simply not processed any further and is either passed off for filler projects or dumped in the tailings. The portion that is sent on to further refinement keeps a comparatively high price simply because the supply is being dialed in to the actual demand. The Chinese producers involved essentially function as a cartel because they have no competition so are able to control the market: if the price goes down they ease up on the processing to limit availability and if it goes up too much they start dumping more onto the market so as to signal to any potential competitors that it’s not worth their investment.

The business of this family of elements sure can be cutthroat - it’s worth billions after all - but this doesn’t take so much as a tiny bit away from how interesting and enigmatic they are. And we make every effort to amplify this aspect by sifting through literal kilograms of the stuff looking for the most visually appealing specimens. These are sent to be mounted in these crystal domes to be treasured as scientific collectibles.