Do you believe a blanket made of duck hair that costs up to 350 million VND?

This is the most expensive duck blanket in the world, and the reason you'll know right away.

Of course, it is not a normal duck feather but a nesting velvet feather in the Arctic Circle. It is famous for being soft as light, and so warm that it challenges even the most extreme cold temperatures of polar winter.

Hundreds of millions because of soft light like air

Every April, Hildegunn Nordum and her husband Erik and some other family members leave Norway to go to Lebanon. This is a small uninhabited island, located in the Vega Islands system, south of the Arctic Circle.

Somateria duck mollissima

Lanan is extremely flat. If only looking on the outside, it has nothing to look at. But it is on the monotonous island that remains raw materials to form the most unique type of blanket in the world - velvet duvets .

Velvet duck (Somateria mollissima) is a large sea duck species, with a body length of 50-71cm. They live in temperate areas in Northern Europe and North America, but fly to the North Pole to breed, incubate and raise children.

Norwegian men who work to collect velvet duck feathers in Lân often favor calling egg-laying ducks here as "second wife". Unlike the hairs of ordinary geese, the feathers of velvet ducks, under a microscope, contain countless tiny hook-like hooks. Thanks to these hooks, it wraps together, creating a layer of "cotton" that is both porous and airy and insulating.

Velvet ducks and their undercoat cover their nests.

On top of that, they're so light that there's almost no weight. The elasticity of velvet duck hair is also perfect. No matter how tight you compress them, once you let go, the blanket swells up like it was in the beginning. It is also because of its high quality, but only one piece, it has been priced at $ 15,000, equivalent to about 350 million VND.

The process of preparing and harvesting elaborate duck feather

Every year, when May comes, it's also the velvet duck from North Europe and North America that crosses the sea to get to the shore of Lebanon. Around the shore of Lånan island is about 1,000 rough rocks that are jagged, and shelter burrows made of wood. But before the "second wife" of the ducks came, the "husbands" of humans prepared their nest for them.

After setting foot on the island, the Nordum family started to clean up the area. They also turn the hay for the old duck drive. The large-sized sea ducks have a habit of reusing nests, so where did they lay last year, but this year, they came to the right place and lay there.

Mother's duck flossed down on her chest to cover eggs.

Lying on the nest, the mother ducks stubbornly remove each precious strand of hair on its chest. With those warm feathers, it covers the lovely eggs.

The hatching time of velvet ducks lasts about a month. Every day, "the duck-shepherd" came to visit the group twice. They tried to walk quietly, watching the duck's nest, chasing away the thin sea of ​​eggs to steal eggs. Only when the eggs hatch and the ducklings follow their mother, do people start collecting duck feathers on the abandoned nest.

Harvest velvet duck feather.

Products are limited, so they are more expensive and more expensive

Nowadays, there are suitable machines to remove velvet feathers, but Lånan's "ducks" still love to clean traditional crafts.

"We want to do all the work on our own for fear that the machine will damage the hooks on the fluff and make the blanket become poor quality" - Nordum explained.

Very soft velvet fluffy pillow.

"It is a very sophisticated job" - she added. Just to clean 1kg of velvet duck, it usually takes up to 3 weeks. And also have to collect about 65 new nest to get 1kg of that feather.

Last summer was also the time when the Nordum family completed their work. With all the collecting feathers and cleaning scales, they reached about a dozen new luxurious feather blankets. It is because the quantity is limited while the quality is good from the table, but velvet duvets are usually tens of thousands of dollars.