How Can You Tell if a Pearl is Real in 3 Seconds - Pearl + Vinegar = --.

A woman named Renata Castellano put two pearl necklaces on my counter in Bayside, and she had already ruined one of them before she walked in. I knew which one was real in about three seconds, and by the end of this you will be able to do the same thing with nothing in your hand and no harm to the pearl. But what I could not do was undo what she had done to the good strand in her kitchen the night before, with a bowl of white vinegar and something she read online. My name is Ezra Feldstein. I spent 40 years on 47th Street. Let me tell you what I learned. Here is the three-second version, and I am handing it over now instead of making you wait for it. Hold the strand up to a window in daylight. Look at the shine and ignore the color. If you can see the shape of the window frame reflected in the surface with a sharp edge to it, you are looking at nacre. If the shine is a soft even glow with no edge to it like a frosted bulb, you are looking at lacquer on a bead. But before we go on, do me one favor that costs nothing. Tell me in the comments where you are watching from and whether there is a strand sitting in a drawer in that house right now that nobody has looked at in 20 years. I read them, and that drawer is where these stories tend to start. Now let me be straight with you about what this does not do. Three seconds tells you whether there is nacre on that bead. It does not tell you whether And the home tests the internet has handed you, the strand is worth $90 or $900. the hammer, the tooth, the bowl of vinegar, nearly all of them answer a question you did not ask while quietly taking value off the thing in your hand. Which brings me to how I intend to prove that instead of asserting it, on the bench in front of me are two strands I already know the answer to. One is a cultured Akoya strand bought in the trade with paperwork. The other cost $11 from a seller who called them fashion pearls. Everything I show you, I show you on both, because a test that only ever gets demonstrated on the real one is not a test, it is a commercial. The first test is the one I gave you already, and it goes first because it costs nothing and takes nothing off the pearl. But there is more inside it than I let on. Knocker is not paint, and it is not glass. It is aragonite laid down in overlapping plates, thousands of them, each thinner than a hair, and light travels a little way into that stack before it comes back out at you. That delay is what a jeweler means by luster, which is why a real pearl throws a hard edge and a coated bead cannot. Put the strand near a window with a frame in it, or stand under a single bulb. On nacre you will see that bulb as a bright spot with a boundary you could trace with a pencil. On lacquer you see a bloom, a soft patch fading out in every direction. Hold a good one and a cheap one side by side and the difference stops being subtle in about a second. Now here is the part that catches people. The fake does not look worse, it often looks better. It is rounder, it is cleaner, it has no little pit on the shoulder where the mollusk had a bad week. A customer holds up the flawless strand and tells me it has to be the good one, and I have to walk her back from that, because flawlessness on a pearl is not a sign of quality. It is a sign of a factory. Remember that the next time you are standing at a flea market table, surface quality is one of the things the Gemological Institute of America actually grades, and it grades it knowing that blemishes are normal on a pearl. A clean surface lifts the price. A surface with nothing on it at all, on every bead, on a strand that costs what a sandwich costs, is telling you where it was made, and it was not made inside an animal. The second test is to stop looking at the pearl and look at the strand. Almost nobody does this one, and it is the fastest of the lot once you have the habit. Lay the necklace out straight on a dark cloth. Now compare the beads against each other, instead of against your idea of a pearl. Are they all exactly the same size? Exactly the same shape? Exactly the same shade from one end to the other? If they are, you have a problem. And the problem is arithmetic. Round is the hardest shape to culture, which is why the Gemological Institute of America calls round the rarest shape there is. Matching a whole strand of them, same size, same overtone, same luster, is a second rare thing stacked on top of the first. Houses sort through thousands of loose pearls to build one matched strand, and that labor is a large part of what you pay for. So what are the odds that a $20 strand off a website is the rarest thing in the trade, 40 times over, with every bead a perfect sphere? Those are not odds. That strand came out of a mold. Real cultured pearls drift. The third pearl from the clasp sits a hair off round. The one at the back has a flat spot your thumb can find. Two of them lean pink and the rest lean cream. And a matched strand is a remarkable object precisely because drift is the default. Which brings me to what a gold buyer in Scranton, Pennsylvania, counted on when Harold Jessup brought in his late wife's strand. The man looked at it for four seconds, said costume, all costume, and offered $22 for the class medal. Harold took it, because the man had a loop around his neck, and Harold did not. Eleven months later, I saw that strand on a dealer's tray at a show in New Jersey with $1,400 written on the card, and I knew it by the knotwork. Which brings us to the third test, and this one uses your hand, and this is where I start taking things away from you instead of giving them. Pick the strand up and let it hang across two fingers. A plastic bead strand weighs almost nothing. Nacre is aragonite. Aragonite is a mineral, and a real strand has a dead weight to it that surprises people the first time. It hangs. It does not float. But before I go further, carry one number with you from here. Nineteen. Nineteen dollars is what Renata Castellano paid for the strand she was certain was the fake off a website at eleven at night. Hold on to that, because when we reach the drill hole, I am going to tell you whether she was right. And the answer shook her harder than the vinegar did. Now the temperature, which is the half of this the internet does get right. Lay the strand against the inside of your wrist, or the side of your neck. Nacre draws heat out of your skin, and takes a few seconds to come up to you. So a real pearl goes on cool, and then warms. A plastic bead is already at room temperature, and it stays there, and you feel nothing at all. However, I promised you the tests that fail, so here is the first one that failed on my own counter. Dennis Kwiatkowski came up from Tampa, Florida with a strand he bought in Kobe, Japan for $700 in a satin box with a certificate. He set the box down and said, Ezra, I ran the two tests from the video. Tell me I did not get taken. The heft was right. The cool was right. The certificate named a shop and a date and not one thing a gemologist would call a finding, which means I have to tell you what the Gemological Institute of America found when its lab bought shell pearls off a commercial website. Those imitations were similar to cultured pearls in appearance and in heft. Read that again. The weight test, the one every list online puts near the top, does not catch the imitation that is actually in the market, because that imitation has a bead of real shell sitting inside it, and shell is heavy. So what was I supposed to tell Dennis? That his hand was never going to settle this, because the thing he was weighing had a mollusk shell in the middle of it, and a mollusk shell weighs what a pearl weighs. The hand test rules out the $3 plastic bead and nothing above it. Keep it, because it is free and it takes two seconds. But stop treating it as the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of one. Remember what the title promised you. Three seconds and a bowl of vinegar. You already have the three seconds. It is the window, and it costs nothing. What is still coming is worth more than what you have had so far. Because the next three tests are what separates a person who owns pearls from a person who gets told what they own. One of them is the famous one. It is also the one that is wrong. If you own anything that has never been looked at properly, a strand, a ring, a chain in a box that came down from your mother, subscribe, because I am working through this trade one object at a time, and the next object may be in your drawer. And the vinegar I am saving for last on purpose, because that is the one Renata ran at her kitchen sink, and it is the only test on this list that cannot be taken back. But the fourth test is not about the pearl at all. It is about everything around the pearl. Turn the strand over, and look at the thread between the beads. On a necklace built to last there is a small knot tied between every single pearl so the beads cannot grind on each other and so a snap thread costs you one pearl instead of 40, which is why my hands go to the knots before they go to the beads. A woman in Queens, New York told me her grandmother taught her that at a kitchen table in Astoria and her grandmother was more reliable than four videos out of five on this subject. Knots cost labor. Nobody pays a stringer to knot between beads worth 11 cents each. The better fakes do it now, so a knot is a good sign and never a proof. But look at the clasp next, because the clasp is where the money shows itself. A $1,400 strand does not get finished off with a base metal spring ring. Look for a hallmark stamped into the clasp, the small mark that states the gold or the silver, and look at how the thread enters through a cup or a bell rather than a bare loop. The fittings tell you what the owner believed those pearls were worth. But the part of this that makes me want to bang the counter is the wording on the tag. Under the federal jewelry guides, a seller may not use a term like faux pearl, fashion pearl, or mother of pearl for an imitation unless the word artificial, imitation, or simulated comes immediately before it, with equal prominence. That rule exists because those three phrases are exactly what gets used to sell a bead to somebody's grandson. If the listing says Fashion Pearl and stops there, you have already been answered. So picture this. You are at a church sale in your town. There is a strand in a plastic tray marked $12. The light is bad, and you cannot put it against your neck because four other people are waiting behind you. What do you do? I will tell you what I do. I turn it over and look at one thing. It takes less time than reading the tag, and it is the test I would keep if I were only allowed to keep one. Which brings me to the fifth test, and it costs about $10, once, for the rest of your life. Buy a 10-power loop. Not a magnifying glass, a loop, the little folding thing a jeweler holds in his eye socket. Then look at the hole where the thread goes in, because the hole is where the manufacturing has nowhere left to hide. On a real pearl, the rim of that hole is a clean edge, and at ten power, you can see the layers of nacre stacked at the cut, like the edge of plywood. It is a genuinely beautiful thing to look at, which is not why I am telling you. On a coated bead, the drill bit tore the lacquer, instead of cutting it. You get a chipped ring around the opening, a lifted flake, and underneath the flake a glimpse of the white bead that was never a pearl. That's not my opinion. That is what the Gemological Institute of America published when it examined those shell pearls. Chipping and peeling of a very thin coating near the drill holes, exposing the white bead material underneath. Arlene Pruitt, a beater out of Toms River, New Jersey, found it before I did, on a strand she paid $240 for, because she restrings for a living and she is at the hole all day long. She brought it in expecting to be told she was wrong. She was not wrong. Which brings me back to the number I asked you to carry. Renata's $19 strand, the one she was sure was the fake, went under the loopy first. Clean rims, stacked layers at the cut. $19 off a website at 11 at night, and every bead on it had been grown inside an animal. Because a freshwater cultured strand can honestly sell for that, and the seller had simply never learned what he was holding. Which means the strand she trusted was the one in trouble, and the strand she had written off was real. That is a sentence I say at that counter about once a month, and the face across from me is always the same face, and the next test is the reason she was already about to make it worse. But the sixth test is the famous one, and I left it down here on purpose, because this is the one everybody gets wrong. You have heard it a hundred times. Rub the pearl along the edge of your front tooth, and if it feels gritty like fine sandpaper, it is real, and if it slides like a glass marble, it is a fake. The physics underneath that is sound. The advice built on top of it is still bad. Here's why the physics is sound. Those overlapping aragonite plates give a real pearl a microscopic texture, and the edge of your tooth is a better sensor for texture than your fingertip is, so it genuinely picks the difference up. The same reasoning sits behind rubbing two pearls against one another and looking for a faint powder on dark cloth. You are grinding the surface off and then calling the dust a diagnosis, which means somebody owed you a word about what you are grinding. The Gemological Institute of America ranks pearl at two and a half on the Mohs Hardness Scale, and it says in plain language that this makes pearl very soft and easily scratched or abraded. Two and a half. Your tooth enamel is the hardest material in your body, and it is harder than nacre by a wide margin. That test works because the pearl loses, and every time a strand gets checked this way, the luster you were checking for drops a little. But the real reason I will not do it on this counter is that it answers wrong in both directions. Gwen Albrecht in Phoenix, Arizona, ran her mother's strand along her teeth, felt glass, and dropped it in the kitchen trash. Her neighbor fished it back out of the bag and drove her to a counter. Ezra, she said, tell me I did not just throw my mother away. It was a fine Akoya worth about $900, and the nacre on it was so tight and so well finished that it read smooth to her. A high-grade pearl can fail the grit test for the crime of being too good. And it fails the other way too, which is why it costs you money at the till. The better imitations now carry a coating with ground shell through it, minute particles that glitter under magnification, and a coating like that gives grit. So the bead that fools your tooth is the bead that was engineered to fool your tooth. Hard to believe anybody sat down and designed for that, but there is a market for it, and the market pays. Which brings us to the last one, the one in the title, the one Renata ran in her kitchen the night before she came to see me. The reasoning sounds airtight. Nacre is aragonite. Aragonite is a carbonate. Acid on a carbonate releases carbon dioxide. Drop a real pearl in vinegar and it fizzes. Drop a plastic bead in and nothing happens. It is a tidy little chemistry demonstration, and it is the worst advice on this entire list. The first reason is what the acid does to what you own. The Gemological Institute of America puts it in one line. Pearl can be damaged by many chemicals and all acids, and the list it gives includes hairspray, perfume, cosmetics, and perspiration. Perspiration. Sweat is on the list of things that hurt a pearl. Now take that two-and-a-half hardness surface, put it in a bowl of acetic acid overnight, and tell me what you expect to lift out in the morning. But the second reason is the one that ends the argument for good. Remember those shell pearls the lab pulled off a website when it ran the exposed bead inside through Raman spectroscopy? The answer came back aragonite. The imitation is made of shell, and shell is the same carbonate your pearl is made of. So the imitation fizzes too. Vinegar cannot separate a cultured pearl from the exact fake that is being sold to you right now, and it damages whichever one you tried it on, which is why what happened at my counter was not bad luck. Renata's $1,100 strand from the estate sale in Great Neck sat in a cereal bowl of white vinegar from 10 at night until morning because a website told her bubbles mean real. It bubbled. It was real. It came out of that bowl with the nacre etched off the shoulder of every bead, chalky where it had been deep, worth a fraction of what she had carried in. She proved she owned something good by taking the good out of it. Remember the order, because if you call me at ten at night about a strand in a drawer, this is what I will give you, and not one step of it touches the pearl, the window for the hard edge and the shine, the whole strand for drift between the beads, your wrist for the cool. The thread for the knots in the clasp, then the hole at ten power, which will answer you on its own. Now here's what forty years behind a counter actually buys you, and it is not money. I am a retired jeweler, forty years in the Diamond District, and I never cheated anybody, which in that building was a choice you had to make again every single week. I am not selling you anything. Standing behind that counter, with an owner in the back room, I was never allowed to tell a customer which tests off the internet would cost her money. I am allowed now, so why would I not use it? So tell me in the comments, which of these had you already done to your own pearls before today? If you did the tooth test, say so out loud. There is no shame in it, half the people here learned it from a mother they loved. And if you are the one who never touched them, say that the loudest, because you did the right thing by accident, and you should get the credit. Remember Renata. She took both necklaces off my counter and had the $19 one restrung, because that one is still whole. She asked me one question on the way out. Ezra, she said, is there a way back? There is no way back, and that is the whole reason I sat down to record this. Next week I am putting the loop on gold stamps, and on the four letters that mean the chain around your neck is not what the man behind the counter said it was.