Everyone's familiar with chromium as "chrome", that super shiny quintessence of what metal should be. Of course, what they're looking at is only a very thin electrolytically deposited layer and oftentimes it ain't even real chromium but aluminum (pshaw!!).

Real-to-the-core chromium is however a brittle metal which explains why its beauty only goes skin deep in most cases. For our purposes though chromium's fragility doesn't matter one bit, and we can enjoy instead its icy blast of white looks.

CAS 7440-47-3