Powdered pearl or mother-of-pearl mixed with lemon juice was used as a wash for the face, and was considered “the best in the world.”[[369]] The pearl powder and lemon juice were permitted to stand for a day or two and the combination was then filtered before using. Another method of preparing this was:
Dissolve two or three ounces of fine seed-pearl in distilled vinegar, and when it is perfectly dissolved, pour the vinegar into a clean basin; then drop some oil of tartar upon it, and it will cast down the pearl into fine powder; then pour the vinegar clean off softly; put to the pearl clear conduit or spring water; pour that off, and do so often until the taste of the vinegar and tartar be clean gone; then dry the powder of pearl upon warm embers, and keep it for your use.[[370]]
Through their composition of carbonate of lime, pearls possibly possess some slight therapeutic value, which, however, can easily be supplied by other materials—as the shell, for instance—and is entirely out of proportion to their market value as ornaments.
Although pearls have lost their therapeutic prestige and no longer have a recognized place in materia medica, their healing qualities are not to be denied, for there are few ills to which women are subject that cannot be bettered or at least endured with greater patience when the sufferer receives a gift of pearls; the truth of which any doubting Thomas may easily verify in his own household to the limit of his purse-strings.
Owing to their beauty and great value, pearls have been deemed particularly appropriate as a sacrifice in enriching a drink for a toast or tribute. Shakspere alludes to this in the words of King Claudius, the pearl being frequently designated union in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries:
The king shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath;
And in the cup an union shall he throw,
Richer than that which four successive kings
In Denmark’s crown have worn.[[371]]
It is stated that a pearl worth £15,000 was reduced to powder and drunk by Sir Thomas Gresham, the English merchant, in the presence of the Spanish ambassador, as a tribute to Queen Elizabeth, by whom he had been knighted.[[372]]