![]() Thanks to Amazon, you no longer need to plumb the depths of a river or visit a jeweler to purchase a set of freshwater pearl drops. ![]() These gems, like so many things, have lost some of their luster thanks to the everyday degradation of value that comes with globalization and 24/7 access to consumer goods. Born of irritation, these gemstones can be mass-produced and purchased with the click of a button. They are created out of animal pain, which has been sublimated into something iridescent and smooth, layered and lovely. Now we know better: pearls are made from some of the basic and common building blocks of nature - calcium, carbon, oxygen, arranged into calcium carbonate particles, bund together by organic proteins. There are stories of pearls falling out of women’s mouths when they utter sweet words, and pearls appearing from the spray of sea foam as a goddess is born. ![]() Pearls were once mystical objects, believed by some to be the tears of Eve, by others to be the tears of Aphrodite. These gemstones are no longer precious, and they come neither from red-rimmed eyes nor from secret caverns in the ocean, but from underwater baskets strung together on sprawling sea-farms. I wish Grimm’s narrator had lived to see our world, one where pearls are so inexpensive that almost anyone can own a pearl necklace or a set of earrings. That does not happen now-a-days, or else the poor would soon become rich. Very likely it was she who, at the princess’s birth, gave her the gift of weeping pearls instead of tears. This much is certain, that the old woman was no witch, as people thought, but a wise woman who meant well. The girl returns home, the king learns his folly, and the old woman disappears into thin air, taking only the precious stones that fell from the girl’s magical tear ducts. The rest of the story is a bit boring, I’m sorry to say. ![]() The girl is lovely, as befits a fairy-tale princess - “white as snow, as rosy as apple-blossom, and her hair as radiant as sun-beams” - but there is one detail that always snags in my mind: “When she cried, not tears fell from her eyes, but pearls and jewels only.” Published by the Brothers Grimm, this strange little story describes a princess who comes to live with a poor crone in that wretched waste place after she fails her father’s Lear-like test to profess her love and devotion. “There was once upon a time a very old woman, who lived with her flock of geese in a waste place among the mountains, and there had a little house,” begins The Goose Girl at the Well. Previously: the grisly sides of perfume and angora. In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the things we adorn ourselves with. Katy Kelleher | Longreads | March 2019 | 16 minutes (4,107 words) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
February 2023
Categories |