u/Zalveris

Someone gave me a bag of free beads which included these extremely dyed pearls which I was hoping to bring closer to their natural color. I think these are natural given their amorphous shape and they lack some of the signs of fake pearls like peeling around the holes. I have them soaking in mostly water with some dish soap right now. Methyl acetate worked last time to remove dye from dyed quartz. Don't have that anymore but I do have acetone which should work as an solvent on synthetic dyes. But everything I've read says to avoid most chemicals with pearls since they're delicate. Since they're fancy calcium carbonate anything low pH is out. What would be the best way to remove the dye if possible?

Update: it has been like 4 hours, I think the dish soap is working, the water mix is turning greenish. Instead of getting rid of the dye it just might manage to redye the pink pearls light green.

Update 2: Sunlight and hydrogen peroxide could work or damage them so I went digging. Sunlight dulls iridescence but at least doesn't seem to affect structural integrity and a lot of the most dyed areas are on the back so if the soap fails I might turns them on their backs and stick them in the sun for a day. 12 hours and I changed the soap solution. I don't think the pink has lessened just the green. Some of the pink pearls are now showing brown/orange patches, I don't know if this is what the dye was hiding or they are getting redyed by the orange/brown pearls (3 of these). Did more digging hydrogen peroxide is used for commercial bleaching but without a formula and what are probably proprietary methods I'm not going to try it.

Hour 16: yeah the green pearls are definitely turning a yellow/orange/brown color. My current though is that all the pearls had some brown, that's why the manufacturers dyed them to begin with. Interestingly removing the dye is restoring a lot of blue overtones and iridescence to the pink pearls. The solution is now a cloudy teal I don't know why, a dead fly got in but that shouldn't have affected too much. Anyone know how long pearls can stay in the soap solution?

Found these cards. This is a partial deck that was probably played at some point. No idea what they are worth. I tried to look it up and the prices vary by like 2 magnitudes for the same card. 1 energy card is bent but the rest don't have any major damage that I can see (I don't know what to look for). I've gotten prices from $10 to $200 so I just don't know.