#UPDATED# A TOUCH OF 60's/70's RETRO (Lava Lamps)

Member Name: Parsley

Product:	Lava Lamps
Date:	09/10/00 (2546 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting to watch, a great addition to a modern room, nice warm glow, give off good vibes!

Disadvantages: none

I love my Lava Lamps! At the end of the 90's we got a 70's revival! We dug out the flares, the platform shoes and the designs and re-packaged them all for the 90's calling it Retro. The colours, greens with purples came back along with the re-mixes and orignal 70's dance music, in London we re-lived it all over again, except for the first time I was too young to remember it!

I got really into the 70's retro with a 90's twist, the flared hipsters with platform shoes and 70's striped tops, listening to 70's dance music - I really felt like I had stepped back in time! but I'm glad that orange formica, melamine cups, orange and brown colour schemes, wooden cladding and strange geometric patterns were left behind in the 70's where they belong!

Anyway, in the middle of this strange time in my life I stumbled across lava lamps. These are fantastic, where have they been hiding for 30 years?

I bought the original "MATHMOS ASTRO" lamps as I think that these have the best shape. I am not gone on the "cheapy versions" as I find some of these a bit tacky. Mathmos are the originals, based on their original design, they have been making them since the 60's, but it's only recently that I have seen them for sale.

A lava lamp is a usually silver coloured stand holding a glass bottle containing coloured wax and a coloured liquid with a small light bulb underneath it. (You can't see the bulb at all). When you turn the lamp on the warmth from the bulb gradually heats up the wax. Once it starts melting, this is where the interesting stuff begins, the wax rises to the top of the glass bottle in interesting shapes and patterns, eventually falling down again when it cools. It does this repeatedly but changing shapes each time. I have 3 lamps and they all do different things with the wax when they heat up. One does very round wax blobs which go up and down, one does stringy ribbons of
wax and one lamp is totally unpredictable, it does allsorts of weird shaped stalagmites and stalagtites, I never know what it is going to do next!

To get the best from your lamp it needs to be on for about 1.5 to 2hrs to heat the wax up, but it is still interesting to see what happens at the warm up. You need to switch it off after about 6hrs to prevent overheating (the wax blobs start to break up into very small bits when overheating and this apparently isn't very good for the longevity of the lamp.)

You can get a very wide range of colours of waxes and liquids with the "MATHMOS" lamps, you are almost certain to find one to match your decor! I have a red one with dark blue liquid, a lime green one with turquoise liquid and I also have a cheaper lamp (not Mathmos) which is green with a clear liquid. I even would like another lamp, a Mathmos orange wax, with orange liquid one, but at the moment I have nowhere to put it!

These lamps are very entertaining to watch, they provide an interesting conversation piece in the living room and when the main light is turned out, they give the room a very warm interesting glow. Don't expect them to light the room up as the bulb is not very powerful, but they are more interesting and safer than candles.

If you have a modern room and are looking for something interesting to jazz the room up, then a Mathmos larva lamp is a great idea. I have had my Mathmos Astro lamps for 3 years now (the cheaper one for nearly 2) and they are still working fine, no bulb changes yet either.

The cheaper versions (approx. £25-£30) can be found in large independent "sell it all cheap shops" as well as in the Index and Argos catalogues.

The Mathmos lamps cost me £49.99 each. I bought my Lava Lamps from "The Leading Edge" in Whiteleys shopping mall in Queensway, London, but unfortunately this has now gone :-(
However, you can order them from www.mathmos.co.uk (
They are made in England) This is a very interesting website and worth a quick look. You can view the lamps and buy them online directly from Mathmos and they also sell replacement bottles and bulbs. They were even selling one lamp that if you changed the bulb (it came with three different coloured bulbs red, green & blue), the lamp wax looked the same colour as the bulb, which is like having three lamps in one.

I can't recommend lava lamps highly enough, they are aesthetic, create the right "vibe" and are very stress relieving to watch!

One parting shot of useless information - aparently the original Mathmos Astro Lava lamp was based on a wartime eggtimer - now figure that one out!

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