Featured Today’s finds- Coral brooch & Earrings

Went to a table top collectors fair today and found a few nice bits .
A white and red coral brooch- looks quite elderly to me?. Any idea of date please?
Also some more modern coral and silver earrings, need a good clean.
Thanks for looking- more bits to come in a moment

 

the brooch is late 19th C. The indicator of that is the long pin, needed before safety clasps became common and that long tube hinge. Probably brass, nicely done.

Earrings are pretty new.

 

Lovely, K.

ca 1880s. Are you sure the white beads are coral?

 

Yay, I’m getting better. That was my guess to OH but normally if I put my neck on the block and actually type it I’m way out!

I’m never sure about anything M!
I think they are though as they have the wavy pattern in them like the pink ones I’ve got. I’m 99% sure they aren’t pearls as some have those slightly flat sides to the sphere that coral has. Are there any other possibilities?

 

ivory, perhaps.

 

Ooh I didn’t think of that.
OH got me a spiffy microscope thingy that links to my phone. I’ll see if I can get some closer photos.

 

Ooh I love my new Christmas present!.

 

Not ivory. I can't decide what it is.

 

I think they are shell beads cut out of the lining of a shell & meant to look like pearls/MOP. Miniature versions of this sort of thing:

 

Agree with Bronwen, shell of some sort.
I think the original clasp broke off and a wire was used for the catch

 

Great document here (all 244 pages of it!) for anyone interested in the different types of coral used in jewellery.
There's even a coral cameo for @Bronwen on page 168 ( or page 142 if you go by the page numbers on the document)
https://data.nodc.noaa.gov/coris/li...NMF4630456_traffic_species_invertebrates9.pdf

 

What a great PDF! I copied onto my computer into my folder of reference documents. I love when sites post PDFs

 

Do you think they are trying to make a point by calling it coral skeleton?

 

I think your white beads are coral ....based on the structure you can see in them. Very pretty!

 

This bead does make me wonder:



But I own some very old coral & have never seen it develop surface cracks as on this bead & some of the others. There also seems to be a degree of iridescence to the white beads. Lighting artifact?

 

I think the bright areas are lighting as the microscope has LEDs up close.
The structure inside the bead is interesting. I don’t quite know what to make of it other than possibly coral with the longitudinal striations photographed from the top as if you were looking straight down onto a cut off section which has then been rounded off into a bead. But WDIK!

 

I keep getting the feeling that they would hatch if kept in water.

 

I think the white ones, rather than coral in its natural state, are fossilized coral - coral that over time turned into agate(chalcedony).

 

Yes they really do!

Ooh this gets more interesting all the time!. More to go and research.

 

That means Mary Contrary just may give you a quartz reading