Costumes and tops have another connection in my mind. I often think of tops as dancers, each with its own costume and characteristic choreography.
I like to give my tops "costumes" (shapes, patterns, color schemes, fluorescent parts) that either visually enhance their natural choreographies or harness them to create cool visual effects at speed.
As we all know, when released upright, some tops tend to sleep quietly then fall abruptly. Many others tend to sleep then slowly transition to a smooth precession with ever increasing tilt and rate till they fall or scrape. That's their characteristic "choreography". For better or worse, reproducible wobbles occur at reproducible speeds in some choreographies.
If launched vertically at high speed and left to their own devices, many peg tops will sleep for a while, then transition rapidly to a long-lasting high-speed precession just short of their scrape angle. That's the chacteristic choreography seen here after 1:30:
High-CM tops with ball tips have their own wild but reproducible choreographies. These can easily be adjusted with CM height, TMI / AMI ratio, and ball size. Costumes make a big difference in how they look at speed.
The connection between choreography and costume is particularly strong in centrifugal, 3D color-mixing, and blacklight tops:
