Artist Uses Extra Spare Time To Bedazzle Snack Foods
For some people, the past few months of quarantine have been an excellent time to cultivate new hobbies or practice old ones. Some people bake sourdough. Some people knit. Some people garden. Claire Hentschker, a New Yorker who describes herself on Instagram as an artist, Photogrammetress, and (most intriguingly) digital taxidermist, bedazzles. Specifically snack foods.
She began last December with a trio of miniature Pringles cans that she gave away in a Secret Santa exchange. She already has a lot of rhinestones lying around, she told Insider, so it seemed like a nice way to get away from her computer. So she kept doing it. When lockdown started, she brought in a pile of snacks from her local bodega and ordered resin crystals online and got to work. As soon as she finished each piece, she posted it on Instagram. But it wasn't until she moved over to TikTok that she became internet famous. A video of bedazzled M&Ms has 1.6 million views.
@ntschk #bedazzled M&Ms ...
Each bedazzled snack is covered in between 3,000 and 5,000 crystals. It takes Hentschker about 12 hours to finish each one. The food is still inside. "I thought maybe, eventually we'd get to the point where I would get so hungry, I'd have to eat Cheetos that I bedazzled," she told Insider. "So far it hasn't happened, but I'm not ruling it out."