These sugar tongs are decorated with clear multicoloured enamels, a technique known as plique-à-jour. Due to the difficulty of fusing the coloured enamels into the spaces of the wire framework, plique-à-jour has a high failure rate, but when successful, it produces a translucent effect similar to stained glass. The technique was popular in France in the 1860s and in Norway at the turn of the 20th century.
