Peony, Willow, Kamuro: What Fireworks Effect Names Promise — and What They Don’t

Why Two Factories Can Both Be Right About the Same Word

Start with the word that causes the most trouble. The American Pyrotechnics Association’s display glossary describes a brocade as a large number of spark-trailing stars falling slowly in an umbrella pattern — that is, a description of the whole picture in the sky. The Pyrotechnics Society’s glossary in the United Kingdom defines brocade as a single star type, brighter and shorter-burning than a kamuro star. Both are current, both are written by people who do this for a living, and they are not describing the same kind of thing at all. One is a sky picture; the other is an ingredient.

It happens again with spider. In the American descriptions it is a fast-burning star burst very hard, so the stars run out in straight, flat, radial lines. In the British glossary a spider shell is a small number of relatively large stars producing an asymmetric break. Fast and even against slow and lopsided. And crossette, which most catalogues treat as a shell, appears in the British glossary as simply the American term for a splitting comet — a component that turns up in roman candles and mines as readily as in shells.

None of these sources is wrong. They are describing the same objects from different seats: a display designer sees the finished picture, a manufacturer sees the star that produces it, an importer sees a carton with a code on it. The vocabulary carries all three viewpoints in one flat list of nouns, which is why it works beautifully in conversation and fails quietly in a contract. The trade admits it in writing, too — the APA’s own entry for a multi-shot cake notes that the effects inside one cake are often such that they defy descriptive titles.

What Is Actually Inside an Aerial Shell

Every effect name in the next section is a claim about one component: the stars, and what they do in the two or three seconds after the shell opens. Everything else exists to get those stars to the right height at the right moment. In the APA’s definition an aerial shell is a cartridge containing pyrotechnic composition, a burst charge and an internal time fuse or module, propelled into the air from a mortar. Four parts travel with the shell, the fifth is the tube it leaves from, and only one of the five makes the picture.

Break height and diameter are planning ranges that move with calibre, batch and air temperature, not guaranteed figures. Rigging, mortar selection and firing are the licensed operator’s work under local rules.

One question sits outside this frame and gets asked constantly: what the powders actually are. Lift and burst are black powder work, while the sharp report in a salute is a different composition with different behaviour and much tighter regulation. That distinction is worked through in our comparison of black powder and flash powder, and the construction difference between a single symmetrical break and a stacked multi-break sits in ball shells against cylinder shells.

The Effect Glossary, With the Soft Words Marked

What follows is the vocabulary as it is used in quotations out of Liuyang.

The second half of the vocabulary is easier, because these words name a whole device rather than a behaviour. If you can hold it, ship it as one item and count it in a carton, the name tends to mean the same thing everywhere.

The full per-calibre range behind the aerial column, with altitudes and packing, is in our professional aerial shells guide; the whole catalogue by category sits in types of Liuyang fireworks.

Why You Cannot Order a Colour, Only a Colour Family

Fireworks colour is not paint: no pigment survives the burn. The colour you see is light emitted by short-lived molecules formed in the flame. The deepest reds come from strontium monochloride, green from barium monochloride, blue from copper monochloride. All three are chlorides, so the composition has to carry a chlorine donor for the emitter to exist at all. Colour is a balance between fuel, oxidiser and chlorine, held at a temperature where the molecule survives long enough to shine.

Which is why two stars of the same colour are not interchangeable. Barium produces green through more than one species, and they are not equal: the monochloride is measurably purer than the hydroxide, roughly 95% against 81% spectral purity. That is the difference between a green that still reads as green from 300 metres and one that goes pale yellow-green on camera.

Blue is the extreme case: the molecule only survives inside a window of roughly 200 °C, which is why blues cannot be brightened with metal fuels and always read dimmer than reds and greens. The chemistry and the buyer-side test are in the science behind blue stars.

Repeat a colour from a lot number. Where a brand colour genuinely has to be exact, it goes onto the printed surfaces — casing, carton, sleeve — which is a private-label artwork question rather than a chemistry one.

Fusing, Timing and Electric Firing

Everything above is named by what it looks like. This corner is named by how fast it burns, and the numbers are specifiable, which makes it the one part of the vocabulary you can write into a purchase order without a sample.

Quickmatch is black match sealed inside a loose-fitting paper or plastic sheath. The looseness is the whole design: fire races along the gap between the match and the pipe instead of creeping along the composition, which takes the burn from a crawl to somewhere around 3 to 6 metres per second. It is what carries fire to a shell and what fires a row of lances together. Shell delay is the internal fuse that lets the shell climb before the burst charge lights, and a shell described as top-fused carries that delay at the top, lit independently of the lift charge.

An electric match is the initiator that replaced a hand-held torch: two lead wires joined by a fine bridgewire coated with a pyrotechnic head, which ignites when roughly an amp or more is put across it. It is routinely called a squib, which is a different and boosted item, and the confusion is worth avoiding in writing. Rigging, continuity testing and firing all belong to the licensed operator working under local rules, and this page deliberately stops at what the parts are.

The reason a buyer should care has nothing to do with wiring. Chain-fused quickmatch introduces drift — small, cumulative and different every time — so a hand-fired sequence is never exactly the sequence on paper. Electric firing removes that drift, and in doing so it moves the burden onto the product: once the firing system itself is exact, any unevenness that is left has nowhere to hide but the shells. Timing stops being a property of the rigging and becomes a property of manufacture — which is why proof-firing a sample lot tells you more about an electrically fired programme than it does about a hand-fired one. It also puts one field on the specification that buyers routinely leave blank: whether cakes arrive pre-fused for chaining or with individual leads.

Calibre: The One Word Here With a Legal Consequence

Everything above is descriptive. Calibre is not. It is the internal bore of the mortar, it is stated in inches or millimetres, and it converts directly into a required clear distance — which is the number a permit is written against. That makes it the only word in this vocabulary that can make a purchase unusable: an effect you cannot fire because the site is too small is a storage problem, not a show. The distance ladder itself, and how to read it backwards from the ground you can actually keep clear, is in our guide to sourcing by event type.

It also decides the picture, and not in the way most people expect. Break height and diameter both scale with calibre, so a two-inch version of a six-inch effect is not a smaller copy — the stars have less room and less time, so a break that hung and drifted at six inches simply opens and closes at two. When a sample “looks nothing like the video,” a calibre substitution is the usual and most avoidable reason.

This is also the one place where the effect family and the site constraint touch directly. A willow’s entire appeal is stars that keep burning while they fall a long way, and the British glossary is blunt about the consequence: they often, though undesirably, fall all the way to the ground. That is an aesthetic choice and a debris-footprint choice at once. Over a dry field, a marina or a stadium roof, the family you pick changes what lands, not just what the audience sees — which is why the operator, not the catalogue, has the last word.

Low-Smoke and Eco Fireworks: What the Chemistry Actually Says

The cleaner chemistry is real and published. Perchlorate-free red and green illuminants built on 5-aminotetrazole were developed for United States Army hand-held signal items, and the reported results were not a compromise: burn times and light output comparable to the perchlorate control, with lower sensitivity to ignition stimuli. Low-smoke colour systems built on nitrocellulose have been patented for civilian fireworks, and the authors of this literature say plainly that civilian fireworks are a target application.

The trade-offs are measurable. Barium is the standard green emitter and also the ingredient campaigners most want removed. The best-documented barium-free alternative uses magnesium diboride, emitting green through the BO₂ radical: at its optimised loading it reached 561.4 nm with a spectral purity of 33%. Swapping the oxidiser to ammonium perchlorate lifted that to 45% — the barium-free green got closer to acceptable only by putting perchlorate back in. Against roughly 95% for the conventional barium monochloride emitter, the shape of the problem is clear: today you can remove barium, or you can have a saturated green.

What is scarce is verification, not chemistry. Most eco labelling on a carton is about something other than the composition: less plastic, recycled packaging, reduced report, a carbon offset bought against the shipment. Those are legitimate claims, but they are not the same claim. India’s green-cracker category has been contested in exactly this gap, with labelled products found to still contain barium nitrate. A green leaf is a marketing decision; a perchlorate-free composition is a formulation, and only one of the two can be put in writing per article.

Where the Vocabulary Meets Class and Freight

One last thing the effect vocabulary cannot tell you: who is allowed to light it, and what it costs to move. The same name lives on both sides of that line. A 1.4G consumer cake and a 1.3G display shell can both be sold honestly as a peony, and nothing in the word distinguishes a retail box from professional stock requiring a licensed operator and a magazine.

Those are separate axes, and they are set out separately: the tier that decides who may use a product in consumer versus display fireworks, the transport code that decides freight and paperwork in 1.3G against 1.4G, and what each figure on a classification certificate actually attests in our guide to UN numbers and shipping classifications.

Which of These Words Belong in a Purchase Order

“A gold willow like the video”

The clip or a fired sample, plus calibre, star burn time in seconds and whether you want a rising trunk. Hang time is the field people mean and rarely write.

“Brocade finale”

Because this word is contested, name a reference article from our range. Then calibre, number of breaks and trail colour.

“Brand red, Pantone attached”

Split it in two. Emitter family plus an approved fired sample for the stars; the Pantone goes to printed artwork.

“Quiet, the venue is near housing”

Say no salute or report components explicitly, and give the curfew or noise limit you were handed. Quiet is a reduction, never silence.

“A fast cake”

Shots, duration in seconds, shot interval and tube bore. Fast is a ratio of the first two, and two cakes with the same shot count can differ by a factor of three.

“Same as last year”

The article code and the lot.

If a supplier resists putting burn time, shot interval or an article code in writing, that is information too.

Where to Go Deeper

Sources & Where to Verify

The definitions and figures above are drawn from published trade glossaries and peer-reviewed pyrotechnic literature:

• Effect definitions, American usage — peony, dahlia, brocade, spider, pistil, and the note that cake effects defy descriptive titles: American Pyrotechnics Association, display fireworks glossary, plus its glossary of pyrotechnic terms for aerial shell, electric match and quickmatch
• Effect definitions, British usage — brocade and kamuro as star types, crossette as a splitting comet, the asymmetric spider shell, shell delay and top-fusing, and willow stars falling to the ground: The Pyrotechnics Society, glossary and acronyms (PDF)
• Kamuro, time rain and strobe at retail — including time rain against the standard brocade release: Phantom Fireworks glossary
• Colour emitters and what spoils them — the monochlorides, the sodium D-line at 589 nm and incandescent continuum radiation: Journal of Pyrotechnics, colour purity of traditional star formulas (PDF)
• Barium spectral purity and the chlorine donor — the 95% against 81% comparison: Propellants, Explosives, Pyrotechnics, review of coloured light production
• Barium-free green and its cost in purity — magnesium diboride at 561.4 nm, 33% purity rising to 45% on ammonium perchlorate: ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering
• Perchlorate-free red and green illuminants — the 5-aminotetrazole formulations developed for US Army signal items: High-nitrogen-based pyrotechnics, PubMed record
• Quickmatch burning rate — the 3 to 6 metres per second figure: Journal of Pyrotechnics, quick match review and study (PDF)
• What applies at your site — the authority having jurisdiction, the venue and the licensed operator. Distances and permits are theirs to confirm, and no supplier can do it for them.

Sources above were read in September 2026. Break heights and diameters are planning ranges from our own production. Nothing here is safety, legal or insurance advice, and this page is not a manufacturing or firing procedure.

Frequently Asked Questions