These are disposable glass pipettes in the manufacturer's cardboard box. They are used one at a time (one use only) then thrown away to prevent cross-contamination of samples. They are used more or less "by hand" in an autopipettor which allows the analyst to suck up and dispense a known volume very repeatably.
I've always thought they had a very elegant shape and being glass, they are especially pretty. With a nice even stack of them as comes in the box, they formed a pattern that I found irresistable. I was doing some work one night in the room where a box of them happened to be laying on a bench. When I saw them I just had to go get my camera and play a little.
To get the color, I stuck a piece of pink paper behind all of the pipettes (out of frame to the right side of the photo) so that their large ends were all right against that paper. The on-camera flash was diffused by a piece of cut-up plastic milk-jug and the pipettes acted as "light pipes" in a sort of fiber-optic kind of way and that carried the color down through them and made their tips light up like that.
I'm almost ashamed to admit how easy it was to get this shot :)
