Guide to Cleaning and Caring for Pearls

[Caitlin]

I read somewhere that feeding you pearls to chickens will clean them! Of course you have to unstring them first.

As a person who has raised chickens for over 50 years, let me say that this is not quite possible. There is only one place that chickens can put a pearl, and that is in their craw. Chickens have a little pouch on their chest you can feel just below the wishbone They eat pebbles and bits of oyster shell to fill up the craw. then any grain or bugs they eat are mechanically reduced to meal as they pass thru the craw and they don't leave the craw until they are reduced to a ground cornmeal-like material. If a chicken ate a pearl, it would have to be a rather smalll one and the pearl would stay in the craw until it was ground up into powder or until the bird was slaughtered. If a chicken ate a pearl, it might get more rounded in the craw, but I would not count on it!

[Zeide Erskine]

Hi Caitlin,

No to mention that there a no oils in chickens' digestive tracts. If one assumes however, that a birds gastric acid could and would bleach pearls and dissolve a few layers of blemished nacre as well as add fatty acids by having extremely high-cholesterol gall, then that may be possible but not with chicken but with geese and not by feeding the pearls to them in any regular way but by stuffing them as in force feeding to produce foi? gras.

Zeide

[purepearls]

I've heard this tale before but everytime I hear it, I can't help but laugh! This reminds me of the tale my grandfather used to tell me. It didn't have to do with pearls but he swore it worked. I mean he truly believed it. I knew it didn't but I just couldn't bring myself to tell him.

[perlas]

If I'm not mistaken, I read in the GIA Pearls Book that the myth is you have to feed the pearls to the chicken and kill it after a few hours to take the pearls out...

[Slraep]

If I'm not mistaken, I read in the GIA Pearls Book that the myth is you have to feed the pearls to the chicken and kill it after a few hours to take the pearls out...

Hi Perlas,

That's it. That's what they mean. It reminds me of a certain mythical Chinese tea where they feed a horse fresh tea leaves and kill the horse after they are slightly fermented in order to extract it from the stomach.

Slraep

[perlas]

It is an old tale that basically presumes if the chicken passes the pearls, the oils will more or less polish the pearls and enhance the luster. I would not bet on getting the pearls back, however, and even if you were to find fecetian pearls floating around your barn, I do not think you would want to wear them.

I'd rather wear the fecetian pearls than drink alamid coffee.

http://www.arengga.com/Coffee%20article.htm

But they say it tastes great and is one of the most expensive coffees in the world.

Slraep, I'll send you some if you fancy it. This will be a nice substitute for the chinese tea.

[Zeide Erskine]

Hi Perlas,

I heard about that stuff before and decided it ranks right next to wearing live cockraches in 18k cage pins as jewels or snacking on chocolate-covered toasted ants. That is the kind of stuff one sees being served at Jackson Pollock-style vernisages. Fecetian pearls are the only acceptable neckwear for such occasion especially when fabulized.

Zeide

[perlas]

Zeide,

You crack me up.

So you'd rather drink alamid coffee? I'll send one to you if you wish. Consider it as a post-birthday gift. Who knows, you might organize one of those Jackson Pollock-style occassions. Just tell me how it tastes.

BTW, they said toasted ant eggs are sweet and juicy. No need to cover them in chocolate. They pop when you fry them.

[Slraep]

Oh yah, Kopi Luwak. We have that in Vietnam too. It tastes kind of
chocolatey. I wonder if the Philippine one is different? Have you had some, Perlas?

The Vietnamese stuff is rare and worth its weight in natural pearls.

Slraep

[perlas]

Oh yah, Kopi Luwak. We have that in Vietnam too. It tastes kind of
chocolatey. I wonder if the Philippine one is different? Have you had some, Perlas?

The Vietnamese stuff is rare and worth its weight in natural pearls.

Slraep

I have not. I'll send you one. They say it's chocolatey. If the coffee is to be compared with pearls, they are at par with the naturals.

[Zeide Erskine]

Hi Sam,

I think I decline. I am a Gevalia subscriber anyway and even that I drink only to bridge the weeks between M?venpick shipments. I prefer my coffee vegetarian same as my champagne.

Zeide

[Slraep]

Perlas,

I think I will also decline. I'm not a coffee drinker but even if I was,
those civet cats are not free roaming like in the old days when coffee
farmers picked up the doo doo every morning from the plantation
grounds. These modern civet coffee suppliers are caged.

Slraep

[perlas]

Slraep, they're not caged. YET.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4896230.stm

Going back to pearls, anyone has a picture of what is "sunshine cloth"?. We do not have the brand in this area and I'm really looking for a nice way to polish slightly scratched pearls.

[Zeide Erskine]

Hi Sam,

Sunshine cloth is a polishing cloath soaked with sapphire dust. You can get it on eBay or probably also though jewelers' supply stores in the Philippines. It would not surprise me one bit if they were even manufactured there.

Zeide

[Taylor]

All the sunshine cloths I've seen are yellow and relatively small - about 6" square. If you use them on metal, they turn black but I saw little or no residue on the cloth when used on pearls. They are usable until completely black and then must be throw away - they can't be washed and reused. If used just on pearls, I have no idea how long one would last. They only cost a few dollars.
Again,be warned: they do remove a layer of whatever you are polishing. I could hardly wait for my old cultured pearl necklace to dry, so I could try it. It did improve the shine on all but 2 pearls. When I looked at those under the loupe I realized I was polishing bead not pearl. It is very easy to over-do this. When I restring these, I plan to remove the 2 really bad ones. There isn't much life left in this strand anyway... This maybe the strand for hot summer days. I'll just throw it away next year. I think the most vunerable pearls seem to be the 2 near the clasp and the center 3 or so. The center ones get the sweat and perfume - or the stress if you twist your pearls or nibble on them when nervous as one of my friends does.