Purisme Carbon-Fiber Letter-Opener Reviewed: $450 Of Design Brilliance

Let's talk mail.  No, not email, nothing so throwaway.  I'm talking letters – proper letters, delivered to your postbox and preferably handwritten with a proper ink pen.  Letters like that deserve some ceremony in their opening, and thankfully here's just the letter opener for the task.  Purisme's carbon-fiber letter opener, designed by Mario Zeppetzauer, is a luxury slice of award-winning (and expensive) envelope-slicer, and the guys at Yanko Design have been playing with it.

We're not joking when we say it's expensive, either.  Purisme are asking 350 Euros ($450) for the 17g of carbon-fiber, which makes it something of an extravagance if you only use it to slice open your phone bill.

Still, if you have to justify it then perhaps you're not the target audience.  The Purisme letter opener has already won design awards from illustrious boards such as Red Dot and Bio.21, so if it's good enough for their desks – and that of Yanko, who admit to being "smitten" – then it's good enough for ours.