TRADE ALERT re Non-Beaded Saltwater ('new keshi') Pearls

[Valeria101]

Wasn't there some sense that beadless freshwater pearls can / should / ought to be called 'keshi' too? That should help put the stuff into perspective.

This paragraph appears to be the kind of approach the auction house will argue.

Wish I knew about these for a grammar class! [of the old kind, rife with syntactic analysis - sometime I wonder if auctioneers are the last fans of it]

'natural black color'

'bi-product'

'identical in every way, except'

and there even follows a candid explanation of how these accidents are thought to depend on the handling of the shells during nucleation: 'formed by the accidental intrusion ... or small particles of mantle tissue that have detached themselves from the implanted nucleus'


The style is probably less commendable, but it must be hard to write something that can be understood in a few predictable ways at once. Once is hard enough!


Of course I am not defending the practice. Even grammar classes have evolved past this.


I am afraid the crap depends on an essentially correct assumption: if there is a little confusion, it pays to overestimate it. [reason why touting a self-imposed ban on reports didn't strike me as a great humanitarian gesture either].

 

[Valeria101]

These are high-class crooks...

With a taste for teasing. The report starts by saying that the pearls looked like not so great beaded pearls of the bag, and suspiciously nucleated upon candling. If I were a crook, I'd be back to the drawing board by now.

Now, I suspect it really is not possible to avoid a discontinuity between subsequent 'growth cycles' in those pearl-nucleated pearls. Whether there is handling involved, or the bivalve in question had a bad hair day - same difference. The question may be how discrete can such discontinuities get.

And how long until those creative minds would throw away the Pinna pearls and start hiring somewhere near a newly bankrupt freshwater pearl farm.

Conspiracy pr?t-?-porter...


Just a thought.



Besides, perhaps the task of making round-ish keshi isn't such a chore after all. These weren't even trying, and there are quite a few neatly symmetrical ones in this [unforgettable!] hand:

How hard can it be?

 

[Valeria101]

They are skilled crooks with a ... farm at their disposal.

Speaking of which,

what of P. radiata? Anyone?


[Ref. AMNH counts modern sources]

On that list, there are at least two stories of a species tolerated like weeds and picked at like the wild banks of old, subsidized by farming something else nearby. It may not be true romance that natural pearls are not quite so glamorous as a business, but ...