not bone- but there are some plastic-type substances created to resemble ivory with similar cross-hatching that i have seen used for knife handles.
please give dimensions, including hole- and is there any smell if rubbed or warmed?
what kind of clasp is there?
I suspect these are faux ivory Celluloid beads.
If you have a bead reamer, try reaming the hole in one. A strong scent of camphor will indicate Celluloid. A more remote possibility is celluose acetate, in which case the odor is of vinegar. If you get basically no odor, then bone or ivory are the top candidates.
hello ,
je pense que ce n'est pas de l'os , ni de l'ivoire - l'os n'a pas de lignes , l'ivoire serait un peu jaune et peut être craquelé ( voir à la loupe ) et l'angle au niveau du perçage serait plus doux et pas écaillé .
I think it's not bone , nor ivory - bone has no lines , ivory would be yellow ( ish ) , maybe with some parallel cracks ( to see very close ) and the edge of hole would be soft , not scaled .
we had at home a real ivory necklace , the beads were ( are often ) not regular in shape and not that white .
goodbye
hello ,
this could be corozo , called tagua or vegetable ivory - the fruit of a palm tree from south america
Hello Luann,
Unfortunately your photo is too fuzzy to make a confident identification. Can you try to shoot them again? Concentrate on filling the frame with an area that has grain/pattern.
Some comments about previous replies:
Plastic imitations (often called "French faux ivory) usually have an attempt to imitate the grain of elephant ivory. The material is made up of sheets composed from fused thin plastic rods that alternate in being opaque white and translucent white. Multiples of these sheets are fused together to make blocks. In their exploitation it is possible to see a longitudinal "grain" that is ivory-like. However, in cross section we do not see Schreger lines (that are arching curves crossing one-another, and radiating out from a common center). We see where the sheets meet one another, in a rather random manner. I have not seen any 'high class' imitations that include anything like a realistic presentation of Schreger lines.
A quick story from my past. At my first lecture on ivory (ca. 1979) I showed the faux-ivory backing of what may have been an early 20th C hand brush. (I found it in the ground in a friend's back yard—and I still have it.) I showed it to Si Frazier (mineralogist/gemologist)—who said this: "It's like the grain of ivory after two martinis." Funny and apt. Since that time I have acquired several more additional specimens—but this is just about the best one I have.
Regarding color. Generalizations are not helpful. The color of clean new ivory is dead-white. It is NOT "yellowish" until it has some age. Furthermore, the Chinese—who have made the greatest numbers of elephant ivory artifacts (in modern times, followed closely by India), routinely smoke ivory to give it a pleasant off-white color. It is probably also oiled or waxed to make it slightly superficially translucent.
Regarding tagua—one of the reasons it is called "vegetable ivory" is because it is a hard white (or off-white or pale) material with a variegated grain—that results from having a layered structure. So, in fact, there IS a visible grain within tagua that is comparable to elephant ivory; but is also distinctly different. It is visually recognizable once you have seen it. (In my mind it is visually more-similar to the grain of fossil palm wood, in some respects). Vegetable ivory derives from a cluster of hard seeds WITHIN a South American palm nut fruit. Not from the fruit itself.
In any event, I agree that, having a variegated grain, your beads are not bone. It is more likely they are elephant ivory. But a better photo would help.
Jamey
