Are these south sea pearls?

[Pearl Dreams]

Interesting, Pareltje. I have not seen them. Will have to have a look.

 

[Pareltje]

I think I posted this picture once somewhere on PG. They are ssps from Agustus. All natural colors.
And London Pearl had this one, natural color ssp from Atlas pearl farm
Cees has a melon green ssp in his collection too.
In Lombok I saw natural pink ssp, but I didn't take a picture because the quality was low, some bald spots where the nacre is missing.

 

[Luvglitz]

Kookey22, I am posting a picture of a brown Tahitian strand. The color is a natural brown color untreated. The brown varies from greenish brown, coppery and grey brown.

 

[kookey22]

Hello everyone. I've asked another online seller who sells chocolate pearls also and seems to be more knowledgeable about her products. She told me that that the chocolate brown/pistachio green/some black or grayish colors of south seas are injected and not the natural color. They are still real south sea pearls, though. That's why a lot of sellers have them here in the Philippines.

 

[Marianne]

Injected? How and with what?

 

[Pareltje]

Injected? How and with what?

Marianne, "injected" is the term they use in Indonesia for treatment with color booster or dyeing. I assume the same is used in the Philippines.

 

[ericw]

I think it's not possible to dye a pearl with any injections inside, but, as such a point that treatments are sophisticated, maybe soon pearls will be kept under perfusions to make special colours nacre ? ... About chocolate colour, I have read somewhere that tahitian pearls were heated to do that. Anyway, colour can be changed by some special internal structure, and not by colour of nacre itself. For exemple, a lavender pearl can have really this nacre colour, deeply, but also if a thin white nacre surface's layer covers a thick conchyoline layer. Then, it's an optical effect between the two wich makes this colour, because refraction of light, through the nacre, gives to the pearl the complementary colour (violet) of conchyoline's amber colour.

 

[pearlescence]

Pearls are dyed by being submerged in a dye solution for a time. Black freshwater pearls, for example, are dyed. White pearls (fw and akoya0 are bleached

with peroxide and UV light.
While Darwinian theories do not explain pearl nacre colour the colours pearl nacre producing cells make is fixed by their genetics

 

[LondonPearl]

We used to produce a quantity of colour enhanced Tahitian pearls in brown colour but about 7 years ago we stopped treating pearls. Today we only sell natural colour pearls. The colour of the pearls in all of the above images were achievable but not natural. There were and are a number of "laboratories" in Kobe that we used to do the treatment for us and I believe they still do these treatments. There are also a number of Japanese pearl dealers who sell these colours. Some of them admit that the colours are "not original" others are less forthcoming .....

 

[pearlescence]

Plenty of golds get their colour 'helped' individual strands will always just look pretty good if the dye work is done well, but still, en masse, the pearls have a brown sort of ear wax look (same as freshwaters. Grace has been churning out hundreds of strands of these)

 

[Pareltje]

One bizarre explanation I've heard from a salesperson in Lombok was they injected the dye in the oyster (I could only assume they injected the dye in the pearl sac or anywhere near the nucleus) to achieve the desired color.
I read from the web page of Agustus that the blue mabes have such strong blue color because the nuclei were painted blue first with a special ink before the nucleation takes place.

 

[ericw]

When green pearls with pink spots ?

 

[Marianne]

Very funny, ericw.