What goes into a pearl report? (GIA Thailand)

[Valeria101]

GIA Thai has started to put research reports up online for some time, and the latest is of a large pearl with some story ('An unusual pearl...').

The paper describes the lab works along the way (all the more interesting for that, methinks):

http://www.giathai.net/lab_research_notes_VP03.php

...to me, it looks like home-made buck shot got that pearl going. What's your guess?

There's more along these lines down there.

 

[SteveM]

Download is malfunctioning for me, only getting 4 of 13 pages before application crash. Introduction seems awfully pedestrian, wrapped in scientific method terminology. I'll have to live in suspense until successful download exposes the rest of the story. If the owner of the 'pearl' in question reads this forum and can give us an idea of who ripped him off, we'd all be appreciative!

 

[jerin]

Download is malfunctioning for me as well, I can see 8 pages, before problems arise. It would be very interesting to see the whole report.

 

[Valeria101]

Ripoff, you say? Now I'm curious to hear what you make of the findings and the pearl!

The links work for me. The file is too lare to attach here (~ 2Mb)... Could e-mail it if you want. On a bad connection, it might work better to right-click the links and 'Save' the file on your HD before opening.

 

[SteveM]

Ripoff, you say?

As a natural pearl, its tremendous carat weight would have figured into the valuation. Perhaps the owner was rolling the dice on the chance he would catch GIA sleeping (or hung over, etc), in which case he would have a certified heavy pearl to offer his deserving clientele. Nothing to lose except the fee, small change in this case.

I did manage to read the entire article, and found nothing extraordinary, even particularly scientific, about the procedure. Perhaps with inorganic gems methods are more sophisticated. But at least GIA effectively served as a gatekeeper in this instance!

 

[Valeria101]

As a natural pearl, its tremendous carat weight would have figured into the valuation.

Ouch!

I did manage to read the entire article, and found nothing extraordinary, even particularly scientific, about the procedure. Perhaps with inorganic gems methods are more sophisticated. But at least GIA effectively served as a gatekeeper in this instance

'Gatekeeper' fits extremely well, I think...

The folks must be proud of getting results without some big black box [=testing equipment too specialized or too expensive to allow for layman reading or replication of results]. Not sure exactly how important this is for research there, but for selling lab work ('gatekeeping', as you put it)... quite so. One reason why I found the article quite unusual: very 'open' gesture for a commercial lab.