Finlay's Jewels
I have been reading plenty lately, just not writing so much about the books. Now I'm trying to catch up a bit, which may be a hopeless task.
One of the several fascinating titles from recent weeks was Victoria Finlay's Jewels : A Secret History (New York : Ballentine Books, 2006). It's an interesting read. Even I am attracted by the romance and sparkle of precious gems. She's written a nice, readable book that is a collection of nine rambling essays about different gems. They're engaging and informative. [See more at the Science Besieged book note, including some other interesting excerpts.]
Here, as usual, is a couple of leftover quotations from the book. In this first excerpt, she relates some interesting fashion history to the original marketing success of cultured pearls — a process first made commercially successful during in Japan by the Mikimoto mentioned. (I'm also interested in the metaphysical question of whether cultured pearls, created in exactly the same way as "real" pearls, are "real" or "fake".)
After all the international controversy about whether cultured pearls were "real" or "fake" it was, ironically, the Second World War and the postwar period that secured the newly invented Japanese gems a lustrous international future. The Allied occupation forces arriving in Japan following VJ-Day on August 15, 1945, could immediately see the money-laundering potential of pearls and banned all domestic sales. Mikimoto was allowed to sell only to the occupation forces. It was hardly surprising that the prices were low enough for ordinary American soldiers to afford them, and GIs bought them in huge numbers to take home to their mothers, sisters, wives, and sweethearts. In 1945 there was a particularly good harvest because the pearls had been allowed to grow inside the oysters for several more seasons than usual and were especially lustrous.
The arrival of "pearls for the people" coincided with the reinvention of the "twin-set." The combination of a woolen sweater with a cardigan had beencreated in America in 1934 as a form of thermal underwear. But by the 1950s, twin-sets were seen as smart daywear and women, who wouldn't normally have dreamed of being seen in public with their underwear showing, were buying them in vast quantities. When fashion editors on both sides of the Atlantic decided that the pearl necklace reinforced the demure image of the layered woolen look, the future of cultured pearls was assured. After the war, many women in Europe and America had gone out to work for the first time and many used their new buying power to purchase pearls. [p. 110]
Now, one other little detail clearing up the origins of the "carat" as a unit of measure.
The Ottomans, and indeed most people involved in the gem business at the time [the sixteenth century], would have weighed the stones using the same measuring system as we have today. The "carat" is an archaic measurement that probably originated in the bazaars of the Middle East and Asia, based on the weight of carob seeds–keration in Greek. Jewelers chose the seeds because they were fairly uniform, and therefore trustworthy for measuring tiny and expensive gems. But the scale was still approximate and even in the nineteenth century when some attempt was made at standardization, a "one carat" peridot could still weight anything from 199 milligrams in Lisbon to 207 milligrams in Venice, which was a problem for international traders. in 1877 several prominent merchants, from London, Paris, and Amsterdam, met up to sort out the confusion. In the kind of pan-European spirit that today would endear them to the Brussels bureaucrats they agreed that in future "one carat" should be the same wherever you were, although the efficiency of their decision was somewhat undermined by the agreement that this uniform weight would be exactly 205 milligrams. Thirty years later the next generation regretted the odd number and from 1907 in Europe and 1913 in the United States a carat was agreed to be the more manageable figure of one-fifth of a gram. [pp. 176–177]