Posted on 08/19/2010 11:31:21 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
Woolly mammoth ivory jewelry is everywhere.
Luxury retailer Stanley Korshak in Dallas can't keep it in stock. Michelle Obama has been photographed numerous times wearing it. For CFDA design darling Monique Péan and Ivory Jacks in Bothel, Washington, that create jewelry out of the material, business has been good.
The First Lady wore woolly mammoth jewelry by Monique Péan on a trip to Mexico a few months ago (pictured above and below)-specifically earrings, cuffs and strands. She wore the cuffs again recently to greet President Obama on his 49th birthday. The cuffs go for $4,480 to $7,420 at www.twistonline.com. The earrings can fetch anywhere between $915 and $2,970 at www.barneys.com.
Unlike elephant ivory which is primarily off-white, woolly mammoth ivory is unique in that it has many different colors-tan, brown and sometimes blue. Ivory Jacks jewelry designer Courtney Tripp explained to me this week at the Gift Show in New York that the colors are a result of thousands of years of mineralization. No two tusks are the same color. So no two mammoth jewelry pieces can be exactly the same.
(Excerpt) Read more at luxist.com ...
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Michelle Antionette strikes again.
Why is this not treated the same as elephant ivory? There are still elephants but mammoths are extinct so there is no renewal of this material.
FUBO and piss be upon him.
What else would you expect a wookie to wear?
Well, because wearing it doesn’t create a market for killing mammoths; cuz they are all already dead.
Ivory creates a market for killing elephants.
It’s been a good seller on ebay for several years now. You can get blocks of it for sculpting, and finished pieces, including beads for rosaries or necklaces. I’m not sure what it goes for now but it certainly wasn’t out of reach expensive a few years ago.
That said, I wouldn’t recommend buying newly carved pieces, the range of quality is pretty wide and ivory can form fissures and fractures all too easily; yes, even if the stuff is 10k years old.
Call Al Gore immediately!! This cannot stand!!
From the article:
**Most jewelers claim that woolly mammoth jewelry is conflict free, eco friendly and sustainable. The truth is mammoth ivory is rare and costly because mammoths have been extinct for millennia.
The AFP reports Hong Kong customs cleared 21 tons of mammoth ivory and more than 90 percent of it came from Russia’s arctic tundra. Most of it is anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 years old.
“Mammoth ivory is absolutely a non-renewable resource, and it is absolutely being depleted, in part, by the commercial trade,” Dan Fisher, a University of Michigan mammoth expert, told AFP.
While it’s hard to say how soon the world’s stockpile of fossilized ivory could disappear, Fisher says it probably won’t be any sooner than about 10 years from now.**
I expect to read soon that they are serving lark, stuffed in a chicken, stuffed in pig, stuffed in an ox - from an old Roman recipe.
This is disgusting beyond words. That these priceless scientific relics would be carved up to suit the vanity of rich women like Michelle Obama is unbelievable.
Shame on the Russians for selling it. Shame on Obama for wearing it.
That’s just it, there’s no renewal. Your purchase of mammoth ivory doesn’t encourage anyone to go out and kill a mammoth. But your demand for elephant ivory might well result in someone going to the trouble to increase the supply by endangering the existing species.
So, can she get a whole whooly mammoth tooth in her nose??
Elephant ivory, at least, is a renewable resource. Mammoth ivory is not.
A lot of natural history is being chopped up for trinkets, losing all scientific value in the process. For vanity. This is disgusting.
She IS the woolly Mammoth!
Indeed.
Next thing you know, they will be fashioning jewelry for the Uber-Rich from irreplaceable Dinosaur Fossils.
It is just vile.
That’s all.
You're talking about RL Mammoths, not World of Warcraft Mammoth mounts?
...
Never mind.
Ah, sometimes the jokes just write themselves...
Colonel, USAFR
Google deep fried turducken!
Youtube used to have a video of a turducken launch that occurred whe the cook did not remove some ice from the bird before dropping it in the hot oil.
3, 2, 1, LAUNCH! ! !
“So, can she get a whole whooly mammoth tooth in her nose??”
Would not a walrus tusk be more appropriate?
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