A Thai truck driver, Montien, had bought some conch at the market and intended to taste it with his family.
Who knows, his son suddenly eats an orange bead the size of a coin while eating a conch. This big, colorful bead is certainly not a pool object! It was identified as a Merlot bead.
Merlot pearls, also known as dragon balls, can not be artificially farmed, each one is a pure natural formation, of which orange is the rarest. According to market valuations, the price of this dragon ball is about 1.75 million yuan, which can be described as a happy fall from the sky. Montian said he would keep the pearl in a safe deposit box at the bank.
A small pearl (not small) is more than 1 million? Is it possible that it is not possible to become a sperm? What the hell is going on?
, duration 00:37
Because it is a conch bead ah ~ ~ ~
A. What is a conch bead
Conch beads are pearls that grow in conchs, and our common pearls are grown in shellfish. Conch pearls are calcium crystals formed when a conch wraps a worm that burrows into the body.
Nature has given the conch shell its unique form and structure, and the golden ratio spiral shape is too complex to artificially plant cores like traditional pearl cultivation techniques. Their common fate is to be eaten (not) and hit by a very low amount of good fortune to produce a conch bead.
Because the mothers (snails) who gave birth to them are different, the conch beads also have different shapes, referring to the differences between Tahitian pearls, South Sea pearls, and AKOYA pearls. In the world of the jewelry circle, the degree of popularity and value of conch beads is also very different because of different beauty.
1 cog bead
The most popular species in conch beads dominates the conch bead world with its pink and colorful appearance. After all, it is the pink and tender that even tough guys like, who can escape her seduction?
Brad Pitt is said to have loved Conk beads so much that he had ordered them from Italian jeweler Damiani.
The English name of Kong Ke Zhu is Conch Pearl, Chinese Kong Ke Zhu (suspected to be a transliteration), commonly found between white, yellow, pink and red, with distinct flame patterns. The high-quality Kong Ke beads have flame-like patterns that are visible to the naked eye, which is what people call flame patterns. At first glance, it looks like a gorgeous and romantic cloud in the sky, but if you look closely, you can find its burning fire, rising and winding, flying and free.
Her mother was a large phoenix snail, also known as the Queen Phoenix snail. The color of the beads is determined by the shell color of the Queen Phoenix Snail, which can change depending on the different stages of life or the food it eats. (Similar to eating more fruit in the world, the baby is born with good skin?) ）
Most conch beads are oval in shape, and a perfect circle is rare to see. Conch beads are also involved in a rich variety of colors, ranging from light rose to bright pink, and sometimes even from gray-green to ochre brown. The presence of white conch pearls has also been found.
How can a pearl of such beauty be restrained and sharp? It is recorded that the first collector of conch beads was Henry Philip Hope, the owner of the famous HOPE blue diamond. Saying that this good thing has not been seen, the conch beads can enter his eyes, which shows the status of the conch beads in the eyes of top collectors. But the production of conch beads was really too small, and for a collector of Hope's magnitude, there were only two conch beads in his 1839 collection catalog.
Another available collector of conch beads is JP Morgan, the banker who named morganite after him, who was in the heart of the money.
According to jewelry historian Johnson Norton, there was no record of conch bead jewelry before 1800, and the earliest recorded conch bead jewelry was a bracelet with ten conch beads set in 1840-1850.
During the reign of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, the love of wild pearls reached a peak, and the royal families of Various European countries used wild pearls as the most valuable jewelry materials on royal jewelry and passed them on from generation to generation.
Queen Mary's conch pearl brooch. This brooch is decorated with 2 natural pink conch pearls weighing 24.9 carats and 28.1 carats respectively. It was made around 1925 and Queen Mary of england wore this brooch to many important ceremonies.
This one was made in Geneva and consists of a Trevallon brooch consisting of a Kong ke bead, a Tahitian grey pearl and a wild white pearl.
2 Merlot beads
The name of the Merlot pearl, this royal treasure known as the "Dragon Ball" and "Flame Bead", its female snail scientific name is Melo melo, belongs to the family of gastropods of the vortex family, is a coconut vortex snail with yellow or yellow and black spots, or papaya snail, produced in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific Ocean. The Thai driver in the news, eating from the conch is the Merlot beads.
There have also been incidents of eating Merlot beads in snails in Taiwan before (why has this foodie never encountered such a good thing?). Definitely eating too little).
The color of the merlot beads is orange red, orange yellow, yellow, yellow brown, to near white, of which the strong orange hue close to the color of the ripe papaya is the most precious.
Merlot beads are a pearl that is very unlike pearls, because it does not have a traditional nacre layer, so it has the crystalline appearance of ceramics, which is called porcelain luster. In addition, the flame pattern structure is also a classic feature of Melody Beads.
Merlot bead earrings, from Hemmerle collection
As for why the Merlot Beads are called Dragon Balls, it is rumored that due to the influence of the Vietnamese royal family on the traditional Chinese dragon culture, the Nguyễn Dynasty, the last dynasty of Vietnam, regarded the collected Merlot beads as "Dragon Balls" and were only collected by the emperor. After the royal family did not fall, these treasures went into exile in France with the last emperor, and he sold them one after another, and eventually lost them in Europe, most of which were treasured by the European jewelry industry.
3 Other conch beads
Imperial Tang Crown Snail Pearl
Large red spiral pearl
There are also some strange-looking (ugly) conch beads, and Xiaobian will not put it up.
The value of the conch beads
Blue Magpie Merlot Brooch.
Sotheby's auction price: HK$2 million.
5-layer Kongke bead necklace.
Sotheby's auction price: HK$3.24 million.
3-layer Kongke bead necklace.
Sotheby's auction price: HK$2.44 million.
A Concor bead bracelet made by Cartier in 1920.
Sotheby's Geneva auction in 2012 sold for CHF 3,274,500. That's about 24 million people.
Conch bead mixed double necklace.
Sotheby's auction price: $1,118,500.
Brands that like conch beads like to spend time hoarding many to make luxury sets.
The Conk bead necklace, made by British jeweller David Morries, weighs 110ct and is produced in the Caribbean.
Speaking of pearls, how can there be no pearl giant MIKIMOTO.
Brooch made by Tiffany.
Why is the price of conch beads so high
1 Production is scarce
It's really rare. Taking Kong Ke beads as an example, generally only about 2500 beads can be found at most a year, of which only 20%-30% of the beads can be used for jewelry processing and design, and high-quality ones are even rarer.
And due to the deterioration of the environment, the number of Merlot conchs has decreased sharply. How little? Protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, it's all about luck to encounter conch beads. And the number of such conchs is not expected to recover in recent decades, which means that there will be very few conch pearls on the market, not the most expensive but more expensive.
2 Pure wild
In the case of Kong Kezhu, for example, it is not only scarce in production, but more importantly, it cannot be cultivated on a large scale! Since the 19th century, people have been trying to artificially cultivate Kong Kezhu, but due to the special exclusivity and sensitivity of the big phoenix, it has not been successful. Similarly, Melody Zhu also stubbornly pushed away the hands of the cultivators, not accepting the success of the people, only accepting good luck in the sky
Until 2009, American researchers carried out artificial breeding of about 50 conchs, and after 2 and a half years of breeding, about 200 artificially farmed conch beads were successfully obtained, and about 80% of the parent conchs successfully survived. However, due to its timeliness, technicality, input-output ratio, etc., it is still a long-term process to promote it on a large scale. Even The King of Pearls, Mikimoto, shook his head when he saw it (I was blind).
Originally, the yield was small, and it could only wait for some necessary factors such as the aura of heaven and earth, the invasion of worms, the gestation of the ocean, and the mother of the conch not to eat indiscriminately. Can this gem, which is born with an aura of luck, be inexpensive?
3 Technical optimization is difficult and technical
For ordinary gemstones, if they are not in good condition, then in order to exert their value, people will optimize them, such as heating.
But look at the pattern of the conch beads, each small flame is different, you say how to optimize... Each conch bead varies greatly in color, luster, and shape. Look at the jewelry made of conch beads that the big names have saved, each one has the same appearance, and no two are the same~
4. How to maintain conch beads
For friends who have conch beads, we must cherish this little fairy.
1 Refuse to be exposed to the sun
The little mermaids who come out of the sea are all wearing the scorching sun and this sharp knife is providing you with beauty, so don't be exposed to the sun for a long time. Note that here is a long time. Are you going to say that I have a problem wearing it out shopping for an hour or two? Then it is not so fragile.
2 Resist corrosion
Don't wear a hot spring bath, and don't wear a bath. Although the composition of the conch beads is 40% carbohydrates and 60% loose stones, which is slightly different from ordinary pearls, washing products with acidity and alkalinity still affect her brilliance. If it gets dirty, rinse with water and dry again.
3 Refuse to bump
The hardness of the conch beads is about 4, although it is a little stronger than ordinary pearls, but it is still more fragile than most gems and metals, and it can only beat the delicate amber. So, store separately!