December 15 – Wear Your Pearls Day

Posted on December 15, 2017

Do you know what an oyster does when an irritating bit of dirt or sand, or even a parasite, gets into its shell?

The oyster blocks the dirt / sand / parasite from the rest of its body, enclosing it in a special sac, and it begins to encase the pesky pest with a layer of calcium carbonate. 

And another layer. And another.

And soon, the oyster has created a strong, hard case around the irritant. Not only is the case strong, it's beautiful and lustrous - it's a pearl!

Motivational speaker DeAnna Bookert encourages us to recognize that the dirt thrown onto us by life - the attacks on us from others or from events - can help us to become stronger and even more beautiful. 

She encourages us to wear our pearls every year on December 15 to remind us of the good aspect of bad events.

Here are some photos of the various different types of pearls. They are here to remind you that, when we take our pain and use it to motivate us to make art, or to fight for ourselves and others, or to show our developing strength in another way, we end up with very different looking lives, very different expressions of strength and resiliency.

And all of that diversity is wonderful.

Also on this date:

Kingdom Day in Bonaire 

Kingdom Day in Sint Maarten 

Midwinter Horn Blowing in the Netherlands

Cat Herders Day

Engineer Gustave Eiffel's birthday

Bill of Rights Day

Anniversary of the discovery of the Andromeda Galaxy

Anniversary of first soft landing on another planet

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on:

• December holidays
• December birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in December

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• January holidays 
• January birthdays 
• Historical anniversaries in January
  

December 14, 2012 - Anniversary of the First “Modern-Day” Imitation Pearls

Do you know where real, true pearls come from?

Oysters make them. Once in a while, an oyster gets what we might think of as a splinter—some little bit somehow gets in between the oyster's shell and its body (specifically, its mantle). This little bit of grit (or sand or bone or what have you) is very irritating to the poor oyster—but the oyster doesn't have hands and tweezers to get the thing out! All it can do is use its shell-making apparatus to cover up the irritating bit. The layers of shell (nacre) covering the “splinter” are what we call a pearl.

And in the wild, they are very rare.

Even more rare are the beautiful spherical pearls. Some pearls turn out to be oval or even knobbly. They are called baroque pearls.

This rarity means that spherical pearls harvested from wild oysters are very, very expensive!

Cultured pearls

People have come up with two ways to make pearls more affordable. First, some people grow oysters in tanks and deliberately insert irritants between their shells and their mantles. The oysters do their thing and cover the irritants—and eventually the people growing the oysters are able to harvest the pearls. These sorts of pearls are called “cultured pearls.”

The second way of making inexpensive pearls is (of course) to make fakes! “Faux” or imitation pearls are made in several different ways, but on this date in 1656 a French man named Jacquin patented a way of manufacturing imitation pearls from blown-glass spheres coated on the inside with ground fish scales.

Fish scales?

Real pearls are iridescent, which means that they shine with different colors depending on the angle of the light. Other things that are iridescent include the insides of sea shells (which are made of the same substance as pearls), butterfly wings, soap bubbles, and fish scales.

Jacquin noticed the iridescence of fish scales and ground up some scales from a fish called bleak (or ablette) and then applied the scales in a liquid form to the inside of glass spheres. The hollow balls were then filled with wax to make the weight similar to that of a natural pearl.

There have been many changes to manufacturing imitation pearls since the 17^th Century, of course, but many faux pearls are still coated glass or acrylic beads.

Also on this date:

Monkey Day 

Anniversary of President LBJ saying, “Some geniuses at Stanford University have created life in the test tube!" –when that wasn't what actually happened!

 Anniversary of the first humans to reach South Pole