Functional optical equipment such as lenses, prisms, optical flats, and color filters are made from hard candy, resulting in working optics that can be treated as either experimental equipment or confectionaries. These hard candy optics are manufactured by an extremely precise casting process, which avoids the need to polish or reshape the candy after casting and allows for the production of a wider selection of optical equipment. This process also allows the inclusion of features that expand the applications of the hard candy optics, but are not themselves optically functional.
