If it means anything at all to most people "barium" will most likely trigger unhappy memories of a nurse watching over you while you guzzle down glass after glass of a gross drink that tastes like liquid chalk. This its most popular use is due to the element's being opaque to X-rays. That way all that chalky juice perfectly silhouettes your gut for the doctor to make out what's wrong with your tummy!

The pure element itself is very reactive and tough to isolate too. Since it's also a metal with few practical uses this makes it a two-fold problem for collectors. On the one hand being little more than a laboratory curiosity going through the trouble to get the metal is costly and, secondly, its high affinity to combine with other elements presents challenges to keeping it from doing just that. Typically, it's dunked into mineral oil which is cheap and inert enough. Inert enough for a lot of elements; barium not being one of them! In oil the outermost crust will hungrily sniff out every last trace of oxygen to form dulling oxides. The most efficient way to maintain the metallic luster of this metal is to encapsulate it under argon. Nothing combines with argon!

This acrylic cube contains approximately three grams of very pure barium metal fully free of oxidation. The ampule is permanently sealed in a cast Lucite acrylic cube measuring 5cm to a side.