Since there was a huge demand for snuff bottles during the snuff’s heyday, these bottles were produced in mass proportions.There are even some bottles that are made of organic vegetable material and organic animal material. Other bottles are even painted on the inside.
Production of these bottles continued well into the entirety of the 19th century. Today, this has given rise to an enormous number of snuff bottle collectors. Original snuff bottles from the Qing period have found their way into the distinguished collection of elite collectors and museums.
There is a differentiating factor between replica bottles and good snuff bottles. An original snuff bottle is meant to be held and touched. So, a good snuff bottle’s extra value is its tactile quality.
Snuff bottles, designed to fit snugly in one’s palm, came in various materials such as coral, ivory, jade, jadeite, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, quartz, malachite, agate, turquoise, gold, and silver, among other things. But glass remained as the most popular material used. Hence, most surviving snuff bottles in existence today are made of glass. During the heyday of the snuff bottle, the Chinese cut and polished glass as they would a precious stone. The Chinese also mixed glass with metal oxides making the resulting cut glass an excellent material for glass sculpture. Such glass was produced in Shantung, while the cutting was executed in Beijing, formerly Peking.
Peking overlay and art glass techniques include the Peking Glass bottle, a translucent or opaque single colour bottle with which the first glass snuff bottles were made. Other Peking glass techniques that were employed in the production of snuff bottles are the mottled glass mixture that creates patterns and swirls, carved glass, bubble glass, single colour overlay, multi-colour overlay, seal type overlay, multi-layer overlay, and the carved multi-layer overlay. All these techniques produced some of the best pieces of glass carvings in the world.