Find your diamond
Find your jewelry
shape
carat
color
clarity

You put the FD&C Red 40 in and you shake it all about

yssie

yssie

Super_Ideal_Rock
Premium
Joined
Aug 14, 2009
Messages
27,486
I’ve been wanting a pair of peachy FWs. Edisons. Metallic.

Seems reasonable right?

But… I have a #Problem… I’m a pain in my own backside. I can’t deal with mismatched luster or colour.

Even in a ~$200 pair of pearls.

…Ain’t happening.

But then I thought… Pinking is basically just leaving pearls in a jar of dilute pink dye for a while, right?

Cue hokey pokey.

A77AFA4E-C1CF-4D63-B793-F7C24DC44CDA.jpeg

:bigsmile:
 
A few weeks ago I tried a bunch of colour combos - mixed colours, alternating colours - with some ultra-cheap freshies. And distilled water, I’m on a well, I don’t see that going well. (Hah.)

Some unexpected discoveries:
- At high dye concentrations you can stain pearls within 12 hours!!
- When the dye is concentrated, the pearl ends up looking dyed. Vs. What I wanted - just a hint of pink overtone.
- Dilute dye does a much better job of “hint of overtone” - but takes weeks…
- Blue food colouring (FD&C Blue 1) stains green! WTH?
- The stain holds shockingly well. I soaked half my stained test pearls in water for two weeks and the other half I wiped/soaked in acetone multiple times, no colour bleed at all :eek-2:
- The dye has zero effect on luster, for better or worse.
 
Last edited:
The lighting in my bathroom is terrible terrible. But it’s at least consistently terrible? :twisted2: Some random pics.

1667101760122.png

1667101833104.png

1667101848783.png

1667101899894.png

1667101921876.png
 
Last edited:
Soooo I'm feeling #Confident now. If I can't buy a perfectly-matched pair of metallics maybe I can food dye my way into one!!

:lol:


I bought a pair of peachy studs Ocean Rhyme on Etsy but... They weren't good fixer upper candidates. LOL. They weren't totally luster matched and - ignoring the amount of green in the overtone - one pearl had a darker body than the other. No clue how to fix that. The luster was amazing though, and the seller (Julia) was very helpful!

1667102517346.png

But yeah, back they went back.


She had another pair that I'd passed over at first, but the more I looked at those pearls the more promising they seemed. Well-matched in luster. Both pearls looked about equally light-bodied. Looked to have the same overtone colours and strength of overtone. Just that the body of one had more purple than the other. Maybe? Figured an in-person look couldn't hurt anything.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1318741351/117mm-soft-pink-pistachio-pearl-studs

I'll add the listing photos here for posterity:

1667103166075.png


They came in last night. IRL they're already closer than I expected, actually! But not close enough for me and my backside pains.

1667103308812.png

1667103320973.png


So... they're soaking in solvent right now, and once I get the posts off I'll take some proper Before pics. And then I'll just update here along the way. Let's see how merited this #Confidence is :lol: I figure there's a limit to how much damage I can do even if I completely bunk them, and maybe a few others will find this nonsense entertaining :bigsmile:
 
Last edited:
This is the most creative--and bonkers :grin:--jewelry idea I've seen on PS yet!
 
This is a wild idea!
Kinda like dying Easter eggs.
Oooooh......I wonder if egg dye might work too....but there's vinegar in that so maybe not.....hmmmmm
 
Befores:

- - - - -

TOP LEFT L-R: Darker, Lighter
TOP RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BOTTOM LEFT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BOTTOM RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BEFORE1.jpg

- - - - -

LEFT L-R: Lighter, Darker
RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BEFORE2.jpg

- - - - -

TOP LEFT L-R: Darker, Lighter
TOP RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BOTTOM LEFT L-R: Lighter, Darker
BOTTOM RIGHT L-R: Lighter, Darker
BEFORE3.jpg
 
Last edited:
After 24 hours in red and blue - various combinations and concentrations. I started out documenting everything but quit pretty quickly - I'm just going it by eye.

This high-luster pearl is taking much longer to pick the dye up than the cheapies did!!

- - - - -

TOP LEFT L-R: Darker, Lighter
TOP RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
BOTTOM LEFT L-R: Lighter, Darker
BOTTOM RIGHT L-R: Lighter, Darker
12HOURS1.jpg

- - - - -

LEFT L-R: Lighter, Darker
RIGHT L-R: Darker, Lighter
12HOURS2.jpg

- - - - -

Getting closer. One pearl still has quite a bit more pink and blue than the other. I'm going to soak the less-coloured one in a reasonably concentrated red overnight, and then babysit some blue-time tomorrow in daylight. Hard to go wrong with red, I think, the other pearl has SO much pink!
 
Last edited:
I reduced the dye concentration for last night's soak thinking that it'd be better to do this more slowly.

But bizarrely enough the pearl drank the colour up this way, and it stained much much much faster :eek-2:I'm so glad I checked it in the middle of the night!!

I'd wanted to take Lighter to a really really strong pink and then mellow it cooler with blue during daylight. I thought - I still think - maybe alternating dye colours creates coloured overtones, rather than mixing the dyes (to purple) up front..?

So here they are very late last night... The lighter pearl is clearly overly pink - and it's got barely any blue overtone, and it's clearly not as contrasty as its mate...

LEFT, L-R: Lighter, Darker
RIGHT, L-R: Darker, Lighter
1667341037745.png

- - - - -

LEFT, L-R: Lighter, Darker
RIGHT, L-R: Darker, Lighter
1667341375125.png
 
Did you only give the lighter pearl a color treatment last night or both of them?

LOL! Getting up in the middle of the night to check the pearl-babies! This is way up there for dedication to The Great Experiment! :bigsmile::clap:
 
And early this evening, after Lighter spent another several hours in a dilute blue. The blue soak did everything I'd hoped it would - it mellowed the pink and added blue/silver overtone. And it also seems to have increased the contrastiness a touch, which I can't explain but I'm more than happy about!!

Honestly, they're close now. Not perfect. One is darker still. But I can't fix tone. I'm going to listen to my pearls girls and keep them as-is - mucking with them more is probably tempting fate :bigsmile: Especially once I acknowledge that if I'd bought them this way I'd have been happy enough and kept them, so that should be my bar! I do think I could still get Lighter a bit closer to Darker on body, but the strength and shade of the blue overtone matches exactly in both pearls right now and I don't want to lose that.


So. Yeah. Wow. OMG y'all. This madness actually worked. What the heck. o_O:twisted2::lol-2: And I love the colour actually. Pistachio + pink. I can see myself actually wearing these a fair bit.

I have no idea how well this dyejob will wear. We'll see. had a moment of imagining how I'd write up a description to sell them... (I'm not selling them!!) How in the world would I write that description up? One pearl naturally coloured, one #EnhancedWithChefmasterLiquaGel? :lol:

Pics coming. So many pictures to sort.
 
Last edited:
I'm loving this thread, so many thoughts...

I'm curious - have you been paying attention to the temperature of the water, location, etc? I wonder if that's a confounding variable here.

The other is porosity, which could be hard to detect. It certainly sounds like some pearls are more porous than others, which means the pigment can penetrate the surface and really "stick" - the porosity could also change as you're sort of, eroding the surface of the pearl? Maybe the dyes are acidic? It might depend if these are vegetable dyes, versus synthetic ones. Pigments have different staying power, so to speak. For example, a lot of green pigments come from plants (chlorophyll), they stain well, and last with UV exposure. But blue is extremely rare in nature, I'd hazard a guess that it is synthetic and why your original experiment left your pearls green.

The order of color is also probably going to matter here. If painting rules apply, mixing the colors is going to have a different effect than dying them one after the other. Mixing = purple, Blue over red = Bluish red, Red over blue = Reddish blue. You may get a more dimensional color by not mixing the dyes, but you'll have to be mindful of the order.
 
Well. Now that I'm looking at those photos I'm thinking maybe I could try to get a little closer… No. I won't. I'm done. Or I’ll regret it. I'll glue the post back on tonight.

Cerulean said:
I'm loving this thread, so many thoughts...

I'm curious - have you been paying attention to the temperature of the water, location, etc? I wonder if that's a confounding variable here.

The other is porosity, which could be hard to detect. It certainly sounds like some pearls are more porous than others, which means the pigment can penetrate the surface and really "stick" - the porosity could also change as you're sort of, eroding the surface of the pearl? Maybe the dyes are acidic? It might depend if these are vegetable dyes, versus synthetic ones. Pigments have different staying power, so to speak. For example, a lot of green pigments come from plants (chlorophyll), they stain well, and last with UV exposure. But blue is extremely rare in nature, I'd hazard a guess that it is synthetic and why your original experiment left your pearls green.

The order of color is also probably going to matter here. If painting rules apply, mixing the colors is going to have a different effect than dying them one after the other. Mixing = purple, Blue over red = Bluish red, Red over blue = Reddish blue. You may get a more dimensional color by not mixing the dyes, but you'll have to be mindful of the order.
Click to expand...
:bigsmile: ❤️ :bigsmile:

Location - inside closed kitchen cabinet (so negligible light).
Temperature ~20C. Measured with a craptastic old mercury thermometer though, so who really knows.

I was thinking that order probably mattered. Nice to have an artist's confirmation of that! I wanted bluish red, so I guessed right. My thinking was that the red should stain enough to change "body colour" but I really just wanted the blue for overtone, and with the cheapies a dilute solution created something that looked more like overtone...

I definitely think that surface quality must matter. But the way a middlingly-concentrated dye was absorbed so much more quickly than more concentrated dye kind of baffles me. Unless as you supposed all of this actually eroded the surface in some visually-imperceptible fashion.

This is SO not something I would ever try with more valuable pearls!! But… Well, after giving my baby Mikis away (to the originally-intended recipient and everything, LOL) I had two empty slots in my storage box, and they were kind of driving me nuts. Y’know. Going from “full pearl stud set” to “not”. So this saga was motivated by more than just #IWantEdisons. Confessional complete. :lol:
 
SparklieBug said:
Did you only give the lighter pearl a color treatment last night or both of them?

LOL! Getting up in the middle of the night to check the pearl-babies! This is way up there for dedication to The Great Experiment! :bigsmile::clap:
Click to expand...

Just the lighter! I left the darker one alone. The darker one has some fairly strong colour zoning, so I was trying to match “just” its face-up.

I’d call them, like, 80% matched? Maybe 90? Better than originally, for sure. But the original match wasn’t the worst. I figure I can always redo this one day if I want.

Yeah. I’m good with it for the price. ~$175 in pearls plus $8 food dye. I splurged a little on the dye. :lol-2: Lots of random ingredients in this stuff actually; I’m guessing the pros aren’t using Karo syrup in their pinking solutions :lol:

7CFFEDBD-7EEF-43CB-97AC-87BDCF48234E.jpeg
87453BD2-7D31-43D2-BC7A-48AA98644EE9.jpeg
114C8AB5-03A7-416F-8DC9-E7A7846C5208.jpeg
 
After looking at those photos - yeah. I can’t let it go. They’re still not the same. But they’re tantalizingly close… I can taste a match… And I’m not capable of letting it go!! It went back in the dye. My plan is a round of purple, then another round of red, then another round of blue. I need that body more purple. And stronger blue this time.

Anyone surprised? Lol. Fingers crossed this doesn’t come back to bite me. :silenced:
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
GET 3 FREE HCA RESULTS JOIN THE FORUM. ASK FOR HELP
Jewelry Blog
PriceScope-Concierge-Ad
Find prime cuts.
Top