It is using less of an expensive material to achieve a similar effect.
Made from ground lapis lazuli, it was an extremely expensive material that few artists could afford to use.
Despite the large sums of money involved, the most expensive material that had to be bought to undo this act of sabotage was twenty buckets of white paint.
Oxford University scientists are creating the world's most expensive material - endohedral fullerenes, spherical carbon molecules containing nitrogen atoms, which sell for £100 million a gram.
BEHIND THE NEWS The trend back toward fur, an expensive material long shunned because of protests by animal-rights activists, seemed surprising in a recession.
It knows that if you have an expensive material, whether silicon for a solar panel, or top-notch wood for a table, there are parts of the product where you can use a cheaper material, and where using the more expensive material is needless over-specification.
But the slate would have cost $25,000 more than asphalt shingles so the co-op decided to use the less expensive material, at a cost of about $43,000.
Among the sheathing materials under consideration for the Freedom Tower are stainless steel, laminated glass and translucent concrete, an expensive material, some of which is sold under the brand name LiTraCon, for light transmitting concrete.
Fusing a cheap existing product (orange plastic plumbing-pipe caps in this case) with a more expensive material (white porcelain) is a hard look to pull off, but Modus Design's Cap Vases make it look easy, and worth the effort.
