Experimental Archaeology

An excerpt from Issue 38 of Katherine’s Small Thoughts and Minor Hours Magazine, regarding experiments with pearls…

On this date, I wrote the following:

“The things I learned about fake pearls tonight cannot be unlearned.”

(Beneath it, I wrote, “It’s been an Evening, boys.”)

It was not until April of 2023 that I finally revealed what had occasioned the above comment, but eventually I was ready to reveal all– and herein lies that story.

Some lengthy time prior I had found two related recipes, both of which are nearly identical and so are probably just the same recipe edited across a decade. The first is from the 1696 English translation of Barbe’s The French Perfumer:

Another sort of Pomatum, very fine for the Face.

TAKE two Ounces of Oyl of Sweet-Almonds, half an Ounce of Virgin-Wax[,] four Penny-worth of Sperma-Ceti; melt the whole together in an Earthen Dish, over a Chafing-dish full of burning Ashes; stir gently the Wax with a wooden Spatula, that the whole be well mingled and incorporated: Then take off the Fire your Composition, and pour to it by degrees some fair Water, beating it in the mean while with the Spatula. Continue so doing till your dish is full, and your Pomatum congealed in the Water, for it must swim in the Water: Having so beat it a long while in the first Water, pour the Water out, and put some fresh, still working your Pomatum till ‘tis white, then it will swim upon the Water; take it out with the Spatula, and work it without Water, till it is very white. All the Water being strained out of your Pomatum, mix in it Borax beaten very fine, of the bigness of a small Nut, and some Essence of Pearl beaten very fine; mingle it all together very well, and ’tis done.

The second is from the 1711 English translation of our lip-balm lad Lémery’s Arcana Curiosa:

Another very fine Pomatum for the Face

Take Two Ounces of Oil of Sweet Almonds cool-drawn, half an Ounce of Virgin’s Wax, set ’em over a gentle Fire to melt together, after this fine [?] ’em in Spring-water again and again till the Pomatum comes to a pure Whiteness, then add a little Borax and Seed-pearl in fine Pouder, and beat up again to the Consistence of a Delicate Unguent.

I really loved having these two recipes to compare against one another– Barbe has more detail, but also wanted me to add a little over 8 grams of whale goo to the mix, which I was disinclined to do. Meanwhile, Lémery’s recipe is considerably shorter and in more modern English (hooray for a decade of development!), but it’s a recipe that clearly relies on some shorthand terms– which, fortunately, are described by the earlier Barbe text.

(NOTE: Regarding whale goo, artificial spermaceti exists! It’s called cetyl esters wax, and it’s made from coconuts. But also, apparently the previously-a-mystery-to-me jojoba oil is considered a reasonable replacement– so if you ever want to gross out people, here you go, just start talking about how the jojoba oil in your friend’s homemade whatever is there to replace the skull wax from sperm whales.)

Since spermaceti left the recipe sometime between 1696 and 1711, I wasn’t particularly concerned with getting any of its replacements. However, I was intrigued by the change to the “pearl” ingredient thrown in at the end.

Was there, I wondered, any difference between “Essence of Pearl” and “Seed pearl in fine powder”?

There are quite a lot of ways to prepare pearls, if you’re a 1600s apothecary.

“Magistery of Pearls” is pearls dissolved in vinegar.

“Salt of Pearls” is the salt leftover from when Magistery of Pearls is distilled in an alembic.

“Aqua perlata” is pearls dissolved in lemon juice, decanted, more lemon juice added back in, and then an enormous pile of sugar to finish up– essentially lemonade with Super Pearl Power (TM).

There were also Oils, Liquors, Tinctures, Arcanums, Flowers, and Spirits– all of which, if your name is Moyse Charas and you’re feeling salty about unscrupulous Authors, were “drawn forth by the help of corroding Menstruums, which are rather Destructions than Preparations.”

Pearls were considered a really special medical ingredient, useful for things like heart palpitations, diseases of the eye, poison resistance, healing from pestilence and malignant fevers, a “great help for those who are sad or timid in every sickness which is caused by melancholia“.

Pearls, though, were really expensive, which to be honest was probably a large part of why they were Special. So there was, let us say, an opportunity for a clever inventor to fill an otherwise empty commercial niche.

Enter M. Jacquin and his process for creating artificial pearls.

M. Jacquin made rosaries, and he wanted pearls for them– but he also wanted regular people to be able to afford those rosaries. Around about 1656 he figured out that if one harvested the scales of wee fishies, the natural iridescence of those scales could be extracted and then applied to stuff to make fake, but nice-looking, pearls.

That iridescence is, ta da, Essence of Pearls. Mystery solved.

Cool, I thought. Well, let’s just see if ground-up fish scales are still around–

Neat! They are! In fact, while the name “essence of pearl” isn’t used so much anymore, this stuff is often referred to by the chemical structure: crystalline guanine.

(You may recognize “guanine” from such fabulous places as our DNA, the related word “guano”, or this list of FDA-approved colorants that are exempt from testing and are also coincidentally used frequently by very fancy cosmetic companies.)

What I discovered, though, after whole minutes of fruitless searching, is that wee little independent weirdos like me can’t get crystalline guanine for love or money– it’s just not available in the consumer market.

Real pearl powder, on the other hand…

Pearl powder is both expensive and hard as hell to ensure is pure when you’re just a funky little alchemist like myself. I came to the conclusion that, really, it made the MOST sense to just buy a nut grinder and a bag of seed pearls. Goodness, thought I, how has no one else conceived of this notion? I am a genius of truly astonishing proportions.

…let’s fast forward a bit.

Imagine me in my workspace. I have a bag of freshwater pearls. I had boiled them the day before to clean them of ickiness, so there was nothing stopping me from taking out my new grinder apprentice, a strapping lad named Henrik who had a bit more muscle power for pearl pulverizing, and going to town on these little lads. Powdered pearls, and therefore an extremely fancy pomatum, were within my grasp.

I paused to take several very cute process photos. Everything was going great.

…Until I tried to actually grind the bastards. Whereupon my suspicions were raised as to the veracity of their nature when, rather than neatly grinding down into powder (as anything in the 2-to-4 range of the Mohs hardness scale ought), they proceeded to make a hideous cracking sound, smell like burnt hair, and beat the ever-loving shit out of poor Henrik.

I do not relish telling young Henrik’s family of what happened to him under my cruel mastery.

Just in case this turned out to be a case of my picking the wrong tools for the job, I also hauled out a metal mortar and pestle and tried whacking the pearls. Notably, this was also a colossal failure.

My hopes and dreams for outwitting the 17th century and having easily sourced pearl powder? Dashed.

This, as it turns out, was harder than it looked. So here’s my hard-won wisdom, such as it is.

Some tests one can perform in public before purchasing pearls:

• Check that they aren’t all identical. (Machines make identical things. Weird biological processes make weird biological things.)(Note: This is also a fascinating way to determine fakeness in cryptid sightings. If that is. You know. Something you’re doing. Anyway–)
• Check the surface feel. (Pearls are made in layers and have a textured surface. If you rub them against each other or on your teeth, they feel gritty.)
• Weight/touch/temperature. (These are apparently also ways to tell the difference between real pearls and fakes. I have no confidence in my ability to use these methods, and therefore I decline to consider them further.)
• Check the drill holes. (Because of how soft pearls are, beads made from real pearls must often have very tiny holes so as to not destroy the overall structure. Fake pearls have larger holes, and under magnification those holes look kind of funky.)

Using these methods, plus a perhaps naïve assumption that truth in advertising was a law that covered both regular companies and the peddlers of pearls, I had assumed the shiny boys I’d purchased were real. However, there are many fakes out there that are genuinely trying to fool people (such as hapless hobbyists just trying their best–), and these methods won’t work against them.

(Incidentally, I’m not saying there is no purpose in this world for imitation or artificial pearls– which are different from “fakes”, in my mind, because they’re not trying to fool anyone. Some common imitation pearls are bathed pearls, cotton pearls, glass and Majorica pearls, Roman pearls, etc. – provided they’re labeled as such, they’re okay fellas in my book.)

Anyway. Let’s look at some of the things that can be done once you have some pearls and, also, no witnesses to your crimes.

So for real, probably don’t do this one. But if you do, be advised that:

• The internet says real pearls, held in an open flame, won’t smell. Whether this is true or not, I can say that fake pearls do, and it is not a smell that is easy to dissipate. So, uh, fire tests should be conducted outside. (Except don’t do fire tests.)
• The internet also says that real pearls won’t scorch under an open flame. Or maybe they do, but it wipes off easily. Or maybe they do, and they’re permanently discolored, but they’re not peeling or anything. Or maybe they don’t scorch, but boy howdy they can explode.

All this to say: The internet was singularly unhelpful with regard to actual consistent instructions and results for the fire test, and I am now wondering whether any of my 1600s alchemical guides provide better details on the matter.

Remember the Mohs hardness scale? And how delicate real pearls are?

Yeah.

I have, since the tragedy that befell Henrik, gone and bought some more pearls. These, again, passed that first set of “in the store” tests. But it was time for stronger measures.

(No, I will not be discussing what happened with the fire test. Which I definitely didn’t do in March of 2023, nor did I do it indoors, nor do I regret any of the things I definitely didn’t do related to holding the pearl for far too long under the flame and also what it smelled like. You can’t make me, mostly because, as mentioned, it didn’t happen.)

One of the fake pearls, when smashed by the hammer, did not smash. It did make a valiant attempt at destroying my hammer. One of the newer pearls, when put to the hammer, kind of smooshed and revealed a tiny sad pile of powder after just one love tap, thus suggesting that it is, in fact, real.

NOTE: A gem/jewelry person of my acquaintance has, during the course of writing up these adventures, let me know that when grinding, drilling, or filing sea shells, one should wear a face mask because the dust is liable to make one ill (case in point: heavy metal poisoning is No Joke). Whether that is also the case with pearls is an interesting question, but one of the ways to make fake pearls is via shells and mother-of-pearl, so, like– masks are probably a Very Good Idea when doing any of this, or when working with dust of any kind.

If you take a real pearl, and put it into white vinegar, it’ll do two things:

• Get a fine sheen of small to largeish bubbles across its surface as the calcium carbonate in the pearl and the acetic acid of the vinegar bang into one another and form carbon dioxide bubbles. It’s pretty! It’ll also muck up your pearls, so only do this with test pearls or ones you intend to turn into magic medicine I guess. (No don’t do that, Moyse Charas will come back from the dead to punch you in the throat, we discussed this already.)
• After a few hours (think 24 or so) a very small pearl will dissolve, leaving a kind of gooey shell that you can squish and dissolve too.

You can see a video here demonstrating both the vinegar and the lemon dissolution of pearls, but with regard to my new wee pearl babes in arms, who are– so far as I can tell and without the benefit of actual, like, gem science thingies– actually real, here’s what two of them soaking in vinegar for a few days have been reduced to:

…and if you think you see burned bits of pearl in that vinegar, no you don’t.