I purchased a cute little glass candy dish at a consignment store today. I will love it even if it’s not an antique collectible, because the colors are vibrant and the pattern compelling. However, I would like to know what it is. It was labelled “carnival glass” but I’ve since determined that carnival glass is ALWAYS iridescent and this is not. It’s a thick, footed bowl, made of pressed or poured glass with a color change from leafy green at the bottom to yellow at the edge. The pattern looks very similar to many of the geometric carnival glass patterns, so I can see where they’re getting that.
It’s called carnival glass as a genre; I can’t get anymore specific than that. My in-laws collect and deal in the stuff, so I’ll see if I can get one of them to identify it further.
See if you can find something with a blue LED in it and shine it on the glass - if it fluoresces light green, it’s uranium glass.
Does it have a visible ‘seam’ running across it (the base is the best place to look) - if so, it’s pressed in a mould. Otherwise it could be cut glass (usually more valuable than pressed)
Carnival glass gets it’s name from it’s origin, it was cheaply made back in the early to mid 20th century and was often found at carnivals. Toss a coin into the dish or bowl and it was yours. A cheap molding process developed in the late 1800’s made all this possible. The bowl the OP has does appear to be typical carnival glass, not the cheap post war glass with the spray on colors.
A lot of glassware made in the same time period as carnival glass is called depression era glass. It is generally considered to be of better quality and was often hand made, companies could hire workers for next to nothing and crank out glass items at a competitive price. You often see this as vases and other items that cannot be molded.
The glass that glows under an ultra violet light is called Vaseline glass. Uranium oxide was used to color the glass, the irredescence was just a side product. It was banned in the 1940’s, it was thought to be dangerous. Recently there has been a bunch of Vaseline glass imported from China. It is made with a very low radioactive material.