so now that i've unboxed it for you guys and you saw do i think
that these pencils contain one of the most deadly substances to humans
welcome back mi amigos to another historical art supply video today i'm gonna be unboxing
one of the oldest rarest and quite honestly the most expensive thing that i have ever opened
on this channel i am going to be unboxing a 150 year old artist grade amazing condition pencil
set from the year 1870. and just to give you an idea of how long it's been since the year 1870
during the time that these pencils were made the light bulb had not been invented yet neither was
the telephone charles dickens the guy who wrote a christmas carol more importantly which led to
the muppets christmas carol true classic he was still alive hopping in boppin five years before
these pencils were made the literal american war was still going on same with abraham lincoln and
the eiffel tower wasn't built until 20 years after these pencils were made these pencils are
old now before we jump right into it there are two things that you need to know firstly these
are my favorite types of videos to do but they do take a lot of time research and of course they are
very expensive especially because i rarely accept sponsors so if you like these kind of videos give
it a thumbs up subscribe notifications comment if you like it really really helps me out more
than you will ever know and the second thing is every single time i do one of these historical
art videos i understandably get a lot of people who are concerned that it belongs in a museum
not your hands and i totally get that just know that i am going to take every single precaution
available to me to make these pencils stay in the condition that i got them i am absolutely going
to try my best not to breathe on them broom them sharpen them literally try to keep them perfect
so yeah with that being said let's go ahead and get this party started
here they are 150 year old pencils almost $350 later here is the oldest art supply
i have ever featured on my channel
my very first impression is that it's kind of dark on camera so i really hope you guys can
see them this is in absolute amazing condition for being almost 150 years old the gold leaf
that is pressed on top of this is still very shiny and it looks pretty good against the
green black i'm honestly not too sure what color this originally was i'm gonna say
it was originally a black background but because it's just so old it faded
a lot over time but yeah this is still in beautiful condition and i want to say that
this whole entire tin is made up of some kind of wood i'm gonna guess cedar wood
and if you look on the side bro i am so obsessed because it's made out of a very thin
piece of leather and it's not just like regular leather either it's like treated caviar leather
so if you've ever seen like a chanel uh what are they called chanel caviar leather which
is like a really bumpy texture that exact same pattern is on the back of this case which is
so luxurious my god i'm gonna flip this over very very carefully so we can see the bottom
of the case and the back is definitely much more damaged than the front it looks like there's water
stains oil stains dirt stains the back of this package has definitely landed on some tough times
now if you're an artist yourself or you know a little bit about like art supplies
you might immediately recognize the brand name of these pencils
because aw faber is still making art supplies in the modern day they are now known as faber castell
and the reason for that is kind of messed up i mean it was normal for the time but in
modern day something like that would never fly it originally started all the way back in 1761
when a woodworker named case bar k bar faber he only had one single great-granddaughter who
was set to inherit the whole entire company and i'm not talking about just the one in
germany i mean all over the world she was going to inherit all of these but because
it was the 1850s and because ladies were not supposed to own these giant companies worldwide
she ended up marrying into a very wealthy german family called you guessed it the castells and of
course as these things go they changed the name from a w faber combined his name in it and once
they married he became the owner and still to this day they are known as faber castell
now that you know the backstory let's open these bad boys up and see what what's inside
okay how are we gonna do this so there's been a new development to this story one that obviously
i was not expecting and if you watched any of my other art historical videos you probably
might have already caught this red flag but if you haven't i'll explain it now
in the packaging of the pencils there was a vibrant bright green kind of like a palish
blue color and before i tell you i don't want to freak anybody out because in all honesty i'm sure
it was probably nothing and obviously the seller who i bought it from they obviously told me there
was lead inside of it so i'm sure if there was anything else he also would have told me during
the victorian era they realized that they could mix copper with arsenic and make a green color
and if you don't know arsenic is one of the most toxic substances to humans to give you an idea
of how dangerous it is if you consume 1/8 of a teaspoon of arsenic and this color was known as
shealy's green and it basically unalived a lot of people it reached its height in the 1830s to the
1840s it was around that time in europe and they realized that it was obviously unaliving a lot of
people so that one was banned around that time so i don't think the paint inside is shealy's green
but during the later half of the 1800s which is around the time that these pencils were made
they made a safer version of the arsenic paint called paris green and paris green was safer
because it wasn't directly arsenic but eventually they found out that once this paint gets wet
specifically wallpaper people like plaster it all over the place and it would rain it would like
evaporate and moisten the paint on the walls it would basically create a compound that's arsenic
except in the form of a gas which is probably 10 times scarier than the original in the past i've
been lucky enough to see exact replicas of paris green and the second that i opened this paint i
immediately recognized that exact same color so now that i've unboxed it for you guys and you saw
do i think that these pencils contain one of the most deadly substances to humans
yeah i do it might there's a chance it's a small chance but there is a chance i already was going
to take precaution because these are lead pencils but knowing the fact that they might be paris
green i'm gonna have to take that up to the whole entire next level so from this point forward the
video is about to change the video is now going to be filmed outside completely suited up head
to toe including my shoes i'm gonna have to wear special gear the lighting is going to
be a little bit weird because i'm going to be outside yeah here is my makeshift
and all of that because i am paranoid and you know safety first the show is gonna go on but i just
wanted to let you know about that paint okay let's try this one more time now that i'm all geared up
one thing i didn't get the chance to say is that i absolutely love the little noise
that the little knob right there makes whenever you open it it's very asmr
but as much enjoyment as it gives me it's probably made out of lead too so
wow these are just in absolute beautiful condition my god and it's so weird to wrap
my head around that these are 150 years old because they don't look 150 years old they look
like they were made last year all right so let's go ahead and carefully try these bad boys out
it kind of feels like i'm getting a rock from out
of the yard and just rubbing it on here it's not as smooth at all like graphite
all of these pencils look and feel just like a regular graphite pencil except for this one
double b pencil it left a really weird waxy texture and i'm guessing whatever
filler they use to make it soft it just did not hold up over the past century
something that is so cool is that faber-castell still sells this exact
same product to this day so i thought i'd try them out for everybody and we
could see the differences between the exact same product 150 years later
not only are lead pencils terrible for your health but they also don't have that much flavor to them
look at all the gradients i was able to make with the new ones versus the old ones all the
old ones look the exact same and i don't know why not to mention the highest and
softest level these go to is only three nowadays they go all the way up to eight
next i wanna see how well they smear and how well they erase first we're going to go in with a 2b
i would say they smear about the exact same all right so that's
how well that one erases as you can see perfect beautiful love her and this one
oh it erases really badly look how much it smears when you erase it it like goes all over the place
dude look at that it's like so smeared again because there's that weird wax in the pencils it
just doesn't break down when it comes to erasing instead it just kind of smears all over the place
and i get frustrated now whenever pencils don't stay in place and they smudge so i bet these
were just absolutely so annoying to work with look i know that i said that i wasn't gonna
do a drawing and technically that is true because i'm only gonna spend like literally a minute just
kind of messing around with the pencils but you guys know me i'm obviously not gonna spend $400
on these pencils and not just try them out just just a little bit okay just a little bit
my final thoughts on these pencils i wonder if those pencils were like the creme de la
creme for their time because they honestly were in comparison to new ones they didn't work as well at
all and from this point forward every single time that i see a pencil drawing from the 1800s i'm
gonna be like oh they went off they ate it left no crumbs if you want to see more of my art history
playlist i'll leave it down below again don't forget to subscribe like notifications all that
good stuff i hope you have a good day and with that being said i will see you guys next video bye