10 Old Pyrex Bowls That Are Secretly Worth A Fortune (You Might Own One)

You think the valuable dishes are the wedding china locked in the cabinet, and the everyday bowl grandma mixed cornbread in every Sunday is just old, cheap, and a little ugly. That is exactly backwards, and it is the mistake that sends good Pyrex out the door on the fifty-cent table. This video, told by Marge, who spent thirty-four years pricing dead people's kitchens in the back room of a Dayton, Ohio thrift store, walks through ten patterns that hide in plain sight and shows you why the name that matters is stamped on the bottom, never printed on the front. We count down from the common Butterfly Gold (1972) and the green Spring Blossom "crazy daisy" pattern, through turquoise Snowflake from 1956, the burnt-orange birds of Friendship (1971), multi-colored Gooseberry from 1957, 1957 Polka Dot, and the beloved Butterprint with its little Amish farmer couple that Corning ran from 1957 to about 1968. Then come the ones people overlook completely: solid Flamingo pink from the mid-1950s, the rare late-1950s Pink Stems promotional set, and at number one the primary-colors nesting set Corning launched in 1945, the blue 401, red 402, green 403, and yellow 404, sold by the millions and still sitting on your counter holding fruit. Along the way Marge names the quiet destroyers that wreck value: the dishwasher lifting surface-printed color, chipped rims, thermal-shock cracks from baking in opal ware, steel wool scouring the pattern off, touch-up paint, and overnight bleach soaks. The plain bowl everyone uses is the one the dealer came in for every Tuesday morning. Sources and further reading: Corning Museum of Glass, All About Pyrex history and pattern records Michael D. Barber, Pyrex: The Unauthorized Collector's Guide Barbara Mauzy, Pyrex: The Unauthorized Collector's Guide