Resin is a wonderful, versatile, transformative medium that can be used for all sorts of awesome applications.
From home decor to toy parts, resin is used a lot in our daily lives, whether we know it or not. But as resin has risen in popularity in the crafting world, so has the wasteful, short-lived novelty of preserving random crap in it for fun. And honestly, it's time to stop.
No, but in all seriousness, I'm a resin artist in my spare time. I've preserved some pretty cool things in resin — my best-selling product is tweets floating in a resin coaster. Preserving people's memories in resin is one of my favorite things to do.
So, when I say I have a license to have this opinion, I mean it. And as someone who works with resin on a daily basis, I am BEGGING regular crafters to stop putting random crap in resin just for the fun of it.
When you see people pouring resin in videos, what you're seeing is a chemical reaction that produces toxic fumes.
Many people that I've seen doing cutesy resin crafts aren't wearing the proper PPE for it. You need gloves, a respirator, and MAJOR ventilation to work with resin. Skip that, and your lungs and skin will burn.
Some artists will tell you their resin is safe, and some brands will do the same. It's not safe. It's chemicals. You can't run away from that truth.
A lot of resin artists don't want to hear this, but they need to: resin is forever. Resin does not biodegrade. It's never going to break down and return to nature. It's friggin' plastic.
That's actually one of the many reasons I want to get out of doing resin art. I can't justify making what I make, even if it has a sentimental meaning behind it. So imagine how I feel about seeing people preserve chicken nuggets in it just for a TikTok. Those nuggets are forever now. Wouldn't they have been better being, idk, eaten?
No one needs food, or the trimmings from a dog's nails (yeah, I saw that the other day and wish I could scrub it from my brain) in resin. 50 years from now, where will those things be? A landfill. And that's where it will sit for hundreds of years.
I'm not knocking resin as a medium entirely. But I am asking people to really consider what they consider worth it when deciding what to put in resin. If you're doing it because it's funny, or because you think it'll go viral on TikTok, reconsider.
