Making Artificial Pearls

1907

What a Little Silver Fish Taught a French Beadmaker

"I'll tell you," said a jeweler, "how the wonderfully perfect artificial pearl came to be invented.

"A rich French beadmaker, Molse Jaquin — he lived in the seventeenth century — found a pond in his garden covered one morning with a lovely silvery luster. Amazed, he called his gardener, who said it was nothing — some albettes had got crushed; that was all.

"Albettes were little silver fish, bleaks the Leuciscus alournus. The gardener explained that if you crushed them they always gave the water a pearly sheen like that. Jaquin put on his thinking cap.

"For six years he worked with beads and bleaks, wasting millions of both, but finally he achieved success. He learned how to extract the pearly luster from the bleaks' scales and to cover a glass bead with it.

"What he did — and his method is still used — was to scrape the scales from the fish, wash and rub them and save the water. The water, decanted, gave off a lustrous fluid of the thickness of oil, a veritable pearl paint, a magic fluid that imparts a lovely pearly sheen to everything it is applied to.

"It takes 1,000 bleaks to yield an ounce of this pearl paint. — New Orleans Times-Democrat.