You can use any saucer in the kitchen to pour yourself a generous heaping of sashimi soy sauce for enjoying that tray of sushi you made with a Sushi Bazooka. If you want to add a little more aesthetic to your already colorful sushi dinner, however, you might want to use these Soy Shape saucers instead.
Created by Duncan Shotton, it’s a pair of saucers that make soy sauce poured in it look like some three-dimensional shape. It does that by taking advantage of soy sauce’s varying opaqueness at different depths, making your dipping sauce look like some kind of toy that somehow found its way onto the dining table.
Soy Shape is comprised of two saucers: one that looks like multiple overlapping triangle shapes and another that looks like three overlapping cubes. Of course, they only turns that way once the soy sauce adds depth and perspective onto the saucer’s appearance, looking like erstwhile normal (albeit irregularly-shaped) saucers when empty. The triangle measures 88 x 77 x 11 mm while the cubes measure 88.5 x 78 x 11 mm, with each one cut in Japan-grade ceramic.
Do note, the optical illusion is more pronounced with lighter soy sauce than with dark ones, although the 3D effect should hold regardless of what type you use. And, yes, you can stack them together (the same shape ones at least) like any set of dishes.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Soy Shape. Pledges to reserve a unit starts at £25.