O Canada, O Jewellery Business Canada…

The jewellery publication of the land!
Proper editing and factual reporting, we demand.

O Canada, I will have to help edit thee!
O Canada, to keep your publication correct and error-free!

So I am trying to keep up on my reading and I have one article that I have needed to get around to. The Canucks have this publication called Jewellery Business. It’s Canada’s Jewellery Magazine. There aren’t a lot of pearl articles, but the June 2008 issue has a gem! It is aptly titled “Pearls101: A ‘back to the basics’ look at pearls, written by Betty Sue King, the Pearl Goddess of Sausalito.

I made it through the first couple of paragraphs before I whipped out my pen and said, “Oh damn. This is going to be a good one.”

I was immediately struck by the assertion that “… nucleation process to create South Sea, Tahitian and akoya pearls is the same,” and that, “… cultivation period is usually two years or longer … oysters can produce two harvest.”

Hmmm. That may be pretty accurate for Tahitian and South Seas, but akoya? Hell no! How long a cultivation period?! Two years or longer?! Sure, that is what they want you to believe. But the truth of the matter is that 9-12 months is average. Two years is certainly the exception to the rule. Longer than two years… maybe when Kokichi himself was farming them! That last little part is just dead wrong as well. An akoya shell is never, ever renucleated. It is a one-shot-deal for those little guys.

There were a lot of other little technical errors, but there were also some doozies. I’m gonna have to focus on those or this will turn into a real article!

In two separate parts of the article, the Kasumigaura hybid is described as a hybridization of the Japanese Hyriopsis schlegeli shell and the Anodonta plicata. I am going to take a guess here and say that they meant to say H. schlegeli and Cristaria plicata. That would make more sense. But then again, it is still wrong! The shell is actually a hybrid of H. schlegeli and H. cumingi!

Now a lot of this is just a bunch of technical, pearl-geek crap. But a careful editor should have caught it. Instead, they just mis-educated the trade of “O Canada”!

There were two big boo-boos too. The first was in a graph that described pearl types, sizes and origins. According to the article, Tahitian pearls are produced in sizes of 9-18 mm. Wait, 9-18 mm? Then how is it that a typical auction lot size is almost always 8-10 mm. Oh yeah, and what about all those 7-8 mm Tahitians that everyone has?! I think they missed the mark on that one.

The second big one was the following statement. “… minimum nacre thickness requirements for exports … Japanese akoya must be 0.5 mm …”

From what Japanese propaganda rag are you pulling out this crap?! 0.5 mm nacre is the minimum? Hell, it’s not even the average anymore! Ladies and gentleman of the North! Akoya nacre of 0.5 mm is considered thick, thick, thick, in today’s market. Average nacre thickness ranges from 0.3 to 0.4 mm.