Antiques – Getting Up Close with Ivory

In the monthly mailbag column, I am always urging people to send photos with their appraisal requests, but when it comes to ivory items photos often aren’t enough. With ivory you have to get up close and personal.
Ivory, technically dentin, the hard white substance from the tusks of mammals like the elephant, boar, walrus and narwhale, has had its imitators over the decades. There’s Bakelite, for instance, the 1907 plastic that was almost immediately put to use making ivory-style costume jewelry.
Among ivory’s other imitators, there is also Micarta, a paper-based laminate; Ivorine, a resin saturated linen; and Ivorite, a substance developed by Yamaha to replace ivory piano keys.
So, how can you tell real ivory? You have to get up close and personal. Here are some tips:
Check the obvious first – color and weight. While ivory is white, it’s not bright white, more of a creamy off-white. Also, real ivory is very dense, so objects should be heavy, sometimes surprisingly so for their size.
Ivory was carved, not molded, so check for mold seams. Sometimes these seams aren’t obvious at first, so feel for them on the sides and underneath an object.
Next, using a good magnifying glass or jeweler’s loupe, look very close. Real ivory is a real biological material, organic matter, like our own hair, nails and skin. So, the grain you see, cross hatching or parallel lines, should not be regular or geometrically perfect, nothing in nature is.
Other organic materials one might find include bone, which will feature pits and dark lines, and horn (or antler), which is thinner and can be very dark. These substances will also show irregular graining, and have value in their own right.
Lastly, ivory is a much harder substance than its imitators. It can be carved, of course, but a heated pin, razor or xacto blade should not be able to easily dent the surface.
Carved figurines of a Mandarin and his wife are fairly common from China, so I wouldn’t have been able to tell much about them from a photo, as you can see from the one accompanying this column. It was better that the reader brought them to me in person.
If you want some things of yours appraised, you can send a photo to the email address below, or bring them to me in person at Teaberry Marketplace on Route 9 in Clermont on May 19, or to the fabulous Avalon Antique Show in Community Hall on 30th Street in that town on May 26; More about those in my next column on May 2.
Arthur Schwerdt, a certified appraiser, is the author of “The Antique Story Book: Finding the Real Value of Old Things,” and co-owner of The August Farmhouse Antiques on Route 9 in Swainton. Send your comments, questions and appraisal requests to: aschwerdt@cmcherald.net