Do Shatterproof Ornaments Break When They Fall?

What Makes Ornaments Shatterproof?

Normally this is the part where I explain how clever scientists spent decades toiling to make ornaments you can’t break. But this time, it’s simple: Shatterproof ornaments are plastic instead of glass.

This isn’t the first time ornaments have received a makeover in the name of health and safety: People used to put actual burning candles on Christmas trees. Yes, it was super dangerous, and no, you absolutely shouldn’t try this.

A photo showing a clear plastic ornament next to a box, on a surface scattered with ribbon bows, wrapping paper, and scissors.

A photo showing long pieces of shattered blue glass.

What’s that? You demand more science? Well then, we can look at why glass shatters.

A material’s elastic limit is the amount of stress it can take before breaking or being permanently deformed. It’s based on how far the bonds between the atoms in the material are able to stretch before they snap. Glass has a low elastic limit, which is why it can break even after relatively short drops or small impacts.

The issue isn’t just that glass breaks, it’s that it shatters into jagged pieces, which can be sharper than a clean cut. The reason it shatters is because glass molecules (silicon dioxide) are arranged randomly, which makes it easier to see through and mold, but also means that when it breaks, there isn’t one clean path (called a plane of weakness) that it can take. Instead of snapping along that faultline, it splinters along any tiny crack it can find, and you get a random-looking jagged line. Ouch.

A photo showing small glass chips scattered on a hard surface.

Some glass doesn’t shatter. For example, windscreens in cars usually sandwich a plastic layer (polyvinyl butyral (PVB)) between sheets of glass, so that if there’s an impact, the glass shatters but the plastic holds it in place. There’s also tempered glass, created by heating then rapidly cooling the molten glass. This creates a much stronger glass, and if it does break, it breaks into tiny cubes rather than big jagged pieces.

However, forget all that, because our shatterproof ornaments are made of polystyrene plastic. Specifically, a type of polystyrene combined with butadiene rubber, which is what makes the otherwise brittle polystyrene much better at withstanding impacts without shattering.

Methodology

We wanted to mimic the most common scenarios where an ornament falls off a tree. (Although you don’t have to use these ornaments in a purely tree-based context, you have free will.) You could argue that if we’d been really committed, we would have put them on an actual tree, brought in a cat, and let the inevitable carnage ensue. However, once we’d explained this idea, no one would lend us their cat, so we went with plan B.

We held each ornament by its string and dropped it from heights of 1ft, 3ft, 5ft, and 7.5ft. (So the top of the string was at each of those heights, with the ornament dangling below it.)

We chose these heights because the most popular Christmas tree height is between 7’ and 7.5’, meaning these are the heights your ornaments are most likely to fall from.

We recorded the damage, which you get to see below.

A photo showing someone with black nail varnish hanging a rose gold plastic ornament on a Christmas tree that has a round silver ornament hanging from it and a pink feather decoration wrapped around it.

Video

Key Takeaways

They Are Indeed Shatterproof

Well this is both exciting and disappointing. We’re excited to report that the ornaments we are advertising as shatterproof did not, in fact, shatter. PHEW. That’s a big sigh of relief for the legal department. However, since we are the marketing department, we thrive on chaos and drama, which means we were hoping to see a lot more shattered ornament pieces hurtling through the air. Instead, the prints didn’t even chip!

A photo showing a hand holding a red heart-shaped ornament with a gold-colored plastic top and string, and the badge of a sheriff’s department printed in white.

A photo showing a hand holding a flat round purple plastic ornament with a gold tooth missing from the top (circled in white.)

The Tops of Most Ornaments Snapped

They’re not called snap-proof. While the main parts of the ornaments proved stubbornly difficult to shatter, the tops of 7 out of 9 ornaments snapped at either 5’ (three ornaments) or 7.5’ (four ornaments.)

Interestingly, on the flat ornaments – which had small tops – the teeth broke, whereas on the round ornaments – which had larger tops – the bar the string goes under broke. Maybe this is a coincidence, or maybe it means the flat ones are the wiser choice, since most of those were still usable after 7.5’.

One thing that didn’t work at all was glue. The light-up ornament, while charming in a twinkly sort of way, was glued together rather than using teeth to grab onto the body of the ornament. But it broke after 5’ and while we put it back together for 7.5’, it barely held together long enough for the test. The light still worked, though.

Our Winners

A photo showing ornaments shaped like stars and a heart, printed with YOUR DESIGN HERE, with a Christmas tree lit up in the background.

In a way, they’re all winners, since none of them broke. But we like to be helpful, so we’re going to recommend the Shatter Resistant Flat Star Ornament (Q59769) and the Satin Finish Heart Shaped Shatterproof Ornament (Q89571), since they didn’t break at all.

The Bottom Line

If you’re worried about your dangling ornaments shattering, plastic shatterproof ornaments really do live up to their name – and they look good too. That said, they’re not indestructible, because if they fall from heights between 5’ to 7.5’, there’s a risk the top will break. Ornaments with smaller tops tended to snap teeth rather than break the bar that held the string, rendering them still usable. The true stars were the star and the heart shapes: they’re on our wishlists.

Q#	Name	Any Damage?	View Button
Q44982	Shatter Resistant Ornament	The bar on the top snapped off after being dropped from 7.5′.	View Product
Q59767	Light-Up Shatter Resistant Ornament	The top with the light fell out after the 5′ drop, and again from the 7.5′ drop after we’d shoved it back in.	View Product
Q59768	Shatter Resistant Flat Round Ornament	After falling from 7.5′, the top came off and it lost some teeth.	View Product
Q59769	Shatter Resistant Flat Star Ornament	No! Good job, star!	View Product
Q66893	Flat Shatterproof Round Ornament	Lost teeth from 5′ and 7.5′.	View Product
Q66894	Flat Shatterproof Ornament	Lost a tooth at 5′ but not from 7.5′.	View Product
Q66895	Round Shatterproof Ornament	Lost the bar thing that the string connected to after 7.5′.	View Product
Q66896	Satin Finished Round Shatterproof Ornament	The bar on the top broke when dropped from 7.5′.	View Product
Q89571	Satin Finish Heart-Shaped Shatterproof Ornament	Nope, nothing!	View Product