I would be happy to check one for you if you want to send one. If you don't want to break the strand, and are willing to do this - the hot needle test is very informative. If there is enough slack you can touch a hot needle point just inside the hole on one. If it sinks in readily and you get a burning plastic smell then you probably have polystyrene beads. Acrylic (Lucite) is another possibility but Lucite beads normally look glossier and they will "feel heavier" than polystyrene, which is about the density of natural amber. Polyester beads are even denser than Lucite but generally have a soft matte finish. Without samples of these three plastics you probably won't be able to tell the odor of one plastic from another.

If the needle will not sink in at all then you could have a thermoset plastic like Bakelite but Bakelite is one of the densest plastic and "feels heavy". And your strand does not look like old Bakelite (also known as phenolic resin).

Rosanna,

Please do send me your contact info and I will forward a sample. Maybe knowing the material will give some clue to their age and origin. I suspect they are not very old, but wonder most about where they were made.

Rosanna,

I would love to send you a sample, please do send me a private message. Perhaps knowing exactly what sort of plastic would give a clue to their age, and where made.

Scott

Hi Rosanna,

A while ago I posted a photo of these beads and no one seemed to know what they are. While at Picard Beads recently I saw an African necklace in one of the display cases that was labeled African copal and the beads looked almost exactly like these. If I send you a bead or two, would you test them for me to see what they are?

Nora

Hi Nora,
I will send you a personal message with contact info. And, I'd be happy to inspect one of your beads.

Rosanna

I think your old cracked beads have great character, even if they are plastic of some sort. It seems to me, the more complex a bead, the worse it looks as it wears, but simple beads of any material - stone, glass, copal, plastic - gain character as they show the cracking, chipping, crazing, and discoloring testifying to their long use. I'd rather have old cracked plastic beads like yours than shiny new copal.

I received five beads from Nora to look at, and with a little sniffing and digging here's what I came up with.

Four of the beads with similar color (see pix) had a very strong aromatic smell when I used my bead reamer to ream the holes and sniff the sawdust. I'm pretty sure the scent is myrrh - I have a bottle of myrrh essential oil for comparison. If you check the Wikipedia article on myrrh you will find that the sap from the myrrh tree is harvested in East Africa. Myrrh oil is extracted of course, but these beads seem to be made from raw sap and maybe something else to hold the material together.

Jamey Allen's article from 1976, "Amber and its Substitutes. Pt. II Mineral Analysis", in The Bead Journal, Vol. 2, Issue 4, has a discussion of copal that is relevant to these beads. He lists two types of copal - "true copal", which is a semi-fossil, otherwise called "young amber", and raw or "recent copal", which is the sap of living trees. Jamey also said he was unable to find any firm information about native bead manufacture from recent copal.

The fifth bead smelled like turpentine, so it is clearly a different tree sap. Just browsing around the web, it appears that many trees in Africa are harvested for their sap, so it's not a stretch to conclude that many different tree saps are formed into beads. Probably without doing more investigating all over Africa we wouldn't know for sure exactly what trees are commonly used.

So, bottom line, I learned something, which is that recent or raw copal is the correct term for beads that are made from raw tree sap. The label in the Picard Museum, "African copal" is therefore a good description; maybe "African Raw Copal" would be better as it distinguishes the semi-fossil version from the recent.

Thanks Jamey - and I hope you will post scans of your 3-part paper online someday - it was difficult to get copies but the San Francisco Main Public Library has The Bead Journal in its archive.

This seems to be a fairly comprehensive overview:

http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~legneref/botany/gumresin.htm

Hi Scott,
Got your beads today and they are made from polystyrene. Probably high impact polystyrene (HIPS) - which has some rubber added to increase toughness. The rubber also makes the material opaque.

As far as age & place of origin - if they just appeared on the market recently, I'd guess China. If you have some time, you could search on alibaba for plastic beads and see if you can locate similar ones.

A bit of plastics history-
Polystyrene was a commercialized in 1931 in Germany by the I.G. Farben company. The Bakelite Corp. also made polystyrene - here is a quote from a 1943 text, "Handbook of Plastics" p. 209:

"Natural Bakelite polystyrene is a crystal-clear, water-white material. It is also supplied in a wide range of beautiful translucent and transparent colors for unusual effects in product and package design".

I love how the word "natural" is applied to a plastic...

I'm not sure when HIPS became widely available - probably in the 1950-1960 timeframe. But I don't think your beads are that old. HIPS has very poor wear characteristics so if these had been used for decades in Africa, I'd expect them to be pitted and worn. Here is an image of some HIPS beads that seem to have been around the block a few times. The seller tried to convince me they were Bakelite, and I think is still listing them on line as Bakelite. Of course, maybe they are Bakelite polystyrene! I occasionally see whole strands of these light, lemony yellow HIPS beads with the African trade bead sellers. Wish I knew where they got them! They are the same size & aspect ratio as the short, oblate phenolic resin beads that also come out of the African trade. I've also gotten a few of them mixed in with phenolic beads.

Anyway, good luck with your bead research - shall I mail the beads back to you?

Rosanna,

Thanks so much for testing and reporting on these. No need to return them. They weren't very expensive, so that supports a China origin theory. They have a bit of scratching, but not much, so may be a decade old or so . . .

Scott

Hi! I've seen these occasionally & have always been attracted to them. I remember reading something that these were made in Germany in the 60s to emulate amber beads. The person selling the beads in the photos I'm attaching say they are from Kenya. Believe these are synthetic resin. I love the green ones! Definitely not amber.

Very interesting, Lynne! I'm looking for info on German bead -making from all time periods, so this style of bead is now on my list of bead types to look for in Germany.

Rubyzane's strand is exactly like the one I sent you beads from - so I wouldn't look to hard toward Europe!

With no data to go on, everything is conjecture. So, if Lynne (rubyzane) has anything for her beads that would help establish the date & place, we should look at it. Hearsay evidence may point us in the right direction, but then we'll have to dig until some real facts can be found. Until then, hearsay can become "bead lore" that gets repeated over & over and the origin of the remarks may be lost forever.