An Observation of the Coloring of Vintage Meerschaum

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jhowell

Part of the Furniture Now
Jul 25, 2019
628
1,014
70
Phoenix, Arizona
The truth is, that you barely ever see a very colored modern meer. I've almost never seen a fully colored modern meer either. It doesn't suprise me that you could fully color one if you want to, but it seems like it would take an awful amount of time. Cake shouldn't really impede coloring that much I think, since the most moisture is concentrated in the shank and bottom of the bowl, where there isn't much cake anyways. But the way that those meers are uniformly cream-red colored, makes me think that they were in some way precolored?
Here's mine - it pretty much came to me that way...
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Briar Lee

Lifer
Sep 4, 2021
4,759
13,784
Humansville Missouri
All I know about meerschaum pipes I learned from a man who was the top seller for CAO in the world during the 1990s, from his little shop in Springfield.

He must have been the long lost brother of country star Charlie Rich. Women lined up to buy his meerschaum pipes, hoping their men might look like him, if they did, I guess.

He said meerschaum pipes don’t color from the inside out.

Instead the wax traps the color, and they color from the outside in.

Makes sense to me, I guess.

I didn’t want to argue with a man who looked that much like Charlie Rich, anyhow.:)