At various points in time, winks have been made of bone, ivory (rarely), clay, vegetable ivory, celluloid, various plastics, wood, and metal.

Bone winks, mostly made from cattle bone, are readily identifiable by the parallel striations on them. Bone winks were dyed a variety of colors, though some dyes, particularly yellow ones, faded over time, often making them look off-white.

While it is not exactly known how bone winks were made, bone working researcher Laura Price suggests that a crown saw may have been used. A crown saw is designed for cutting round holes.

Ivory winks, made from elephant tusks and sea mammal tusks, are quite rare. 

Clay winks were formed by molds into which wet colored clays were pressed and then dried. Clay winks are quite prone to breaking, and often exhibit sharp outer edges rather than fully rounded edges due to having been produced using molds. Clay winks were likely used in the cheaper editions of a particular tiddlywinks game.

Vegetable ivory is a material derived from palm tree nuts used in game pieces; it isn’t at all related to ivory made from tusks. Vegetable ivory was used as a cheaper and more adaptable resource for game pieces than bone and ivory. Vegetable ivory winks tend to be much shinier than bone winks, and don’t exhibit bone striations. Some vegetable ivory winks exhibit some warping that makes them slightly convex on one side and concave on the other. These winks are quite durable.

Celluloid winks, also referred to as Ivorine or French Ivory, though they were not made of mammal ivory, were made from an early plastic mixture of nitrocellulose and other materials. Celluloid is rarely used nowadays except, most prominently, for Ping-Pong balls.

In the 1950s through 1970s, quality plastic winks were made by slicing discs off colored polystyrene rods, and then tumbling them in a jeweler’s or rock tumbler to round the edges and buff the faces of the winks. The Walmsleys company in England was a prominent manufacturer of these quality winks, and sold them to a variety of British game manufacturing companies for use as winks or game counters in their games.

Starting in the 1950s or thereabouts, low quality winks were cheaply made via injection molding of sheets (as often found in plastic model assembly kits) containing a multitude of plastic winks each of which were attached to an overall molded sheet by a thin plastic connector, and therefore each wink had to be torn or bent off the overall sheet, thereby leaving a telltale burr sticking off the edge; these winks also often have a sharper edge rather than a rounded one. 

Wooden winks are not at all common, but have been used, notably in a very small number of French tiddlywinks games, even modern ones. Wooden winks are prone to breaking when used.

Metal winks are quite uncommon. Walbert Manufacturing’s Pitch-Em-Winks game includes aluminum winks in the shape of horseshoes. The game Texas Tiddlywinks, made by a company called Texas Tiddlywinks, © 1986, made a tiddlywinks game that uses steel washers (with a hole in them, as they were intended to have screws through them) as the winks.