Maxine and Alix had no business plan.They didn’t fit the mold set by mainstream music but they saw great potential to create a powerful soundtrack for women claiming their place as lesbians and feminists. On the other side of the country and three years later, Alix Dobkin released Lavender Jane Loves Women, the first record produced, engineered and played by women. She didn’t know where she was going to sing her new song until comedy duo Harrison and Tyler asked her to open their shows. Considerable effort goes into creating mixtures that produce unique looks.In California, a month before the Stonewall Riots in 1969, Maxine Feldman penned a song, “Angry Atthis,” about the shame surrounding lesbians. Some forms of quartz countertops now include fragments of mirrors and other glass, brass metal filings, and various mixtures of granite and marble.

While these manufacturers add their own flair and nuances to their engineered stone countertops, they are still working off of that original brevetto, or patent, from Breton. The process consists of blending pulverized natural stone aggregate with a mix of polymers, removing the air, and then heating and shaping the material into slabs that have the hardness and appearance of natural stone.īretonstone technology has been licensed to more than 50 companies around the world, including such famous quartz brands as Silestone, Cambria, and Caesarstone. Over 50 years later, Breton is still going strong and manufacturing quartz countertops. In 1963, the technology of creating engineered stone was developed by the Breton company in northeast Italy, which licensed the process under the trademark Bretonstone®. The industry, in fact, is increasingly using the term engineered stone to refer to this type of countertop.īottom line: Quartz countertops can include some amount of actual quartz, but they include no solid quartz extracted from quarries and likely have lots of other materials in them, as well.Īll Quartz Countertops Essentially Flow From 1 Source More accurately, a quartz countertop should probably be called engineered stone or compound stone-terms that more accurately describe the way these products are created. All of this rock material mixed together and held together with binders is what gives a so-called quartz countertop the look and feel of stone. Yes, there's some actual quartz-sometimes a lot of it. And the other 90 percent? Crushed up waste granite, marble, and natural stone or recycled industrial wastes, such as ceramic, silica, glass, and mirrors. Rather, it's a polymeric or cement-based binder. But about 10 percent of the material volume in a quartz countertop isn't stone at all. In most quartz countertops, some quartz is present.

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An Army of Quartz by Jamie Verzaro