amti: I did not get my Vietnamese akoyas at Ruckus. The 9 mm blues, I bought off the PP website. They were the very last strand, and I was late to the Vietnamese blue akoya party. I suspect they were the worst of the batch, being the last stand to sell, which is like saying you got a 99 on a test when everyone else got 100. The pearls themselves look gorgeous and have very thick nacre, but the nuclei are horrible, which I wouldn't know except I restrung them to put an orbit clasp on them. The nuclei are broken, or loose, or hollow, which makes finding the hole through the center very challenging. It almost feels like the nuclei are hollow plastic beads that did not survive drilling, although I didn't think pearls would coat a nuclei like that. Or the nuclei were something else completely that just disintegrated when drilled.
I also have a rope of small 6 mm Vietnamese akoyas from PP, which are gorgeous. They are similar to BN's short strand she posted today on the 365 Days thread. Hisano had sent me a photo of a couple of strands, and I asked if I could have both strung together. In the beginning, I could tell which pearls came from which strand, as they are slightly different colors. But my brain no longer remembers, and it all looks like one strand to me now.