As she sank her teeth into a hard-boiled egg, waitress Sally Thompson’s teeth hit something hard. Assuming it was just a piece of the shell, she removed the offending object and let it drop onto her plate. But Thompson couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw what had fallen out. So, left stunned, she took what she just had in her mouth as an omen for her upcoming nuptials.
Thompson was engaged to Stephen Warwick, whom she planned to marry in May last year. The 39-year-old from Cumbria in England was looking forward to her bachelorette party the following weekend, wanting to look good for her celebrations. Then, had influenced her food choices that morning.
« I’m trying to lose a bit of weight just before the wedding, and I cooked a batch of eggs all at once to eat over a few days, » she told the Daily Mail. The carton of eggs in question came from a local branch of the chained superstore Asda in soon-to-be-wed Thompson’s native city of Carlisle.
After cooking up the free-range eggs, she was ready to tuck in, transporting her breakfast into the living room. Thompson couldn’t wait until she’d sat down to get started, but as she chowed down on the first of her wholesome treats, she instantly knew something was amiss.
« I bit into it and I felt a kind of gritty bit in my mouth, » Thompson explained in a video featured on YouTube. « I presumed it was a bit of shell. » So far, so normal for anyone who’s ever eaten the staple farmyard food. But then she discovered something astonishing.
« I got it out of my mouth and it sparkled, which I thought, that’s bizarre, » she revealed. So it certainly wasn’t merely a bit of shell that she got caught in her teeth. Intrigued, Thompson examined her find further.
« I looked closer, and to me, it looked like a diamond, » she said in the video. Out of an egg. Given her betrothed status, you might think that the bling came from her own finger, but Thompson insists that that couldn’t have been the case.
« I thought it was strange; I wasn’t wearing any jewelry at the time, » she said in an interview with Cumbria newspaper News and Star. « It took a little while to take in what had actually happened because it was so strange, but I realized that it had to have come out of the boiled egg, » she continued. « At the time, I thought it was hilarious and surreal. »
In fact, Thompson’s choice of adjectives proved to be very suitable indeed, given that the boiling water would have removed any impurities still clinging to the shell, and that this same shell had been peeled away before Thompson tucked in. It’s hard to imagine any other possible explanation of where the gem could have come from.
Naturally, Thompson was quick to verify if her find was the real deal or not. She took the small stone, roughly half the size of a butterfly backing of an earring, to a local jeweler in Carlisle. Sadly, though, she hadn’t hit the jackpot.
Rather than a diamond, Thompson was told that the stone was most likely formed from cubic zirconia, a man-made material that has a similar sparkle. But the fact it wasn’t an actual diamond did little to dampen the bride-to-be’s spirits.
Occurring a couple of months before she was due to marry, Thompson saw the extraordinary incident as written in the stars. « I believe in superstitions like ‘find a feather, pick it up,’ and I think there must be something about the timing of this coming, » she said in an interview in the Daily Mail.
And there was still the question of just how the sparkler came to be inside the egg. Moreover, after sharing the unusual tale on a Facebook wedding page, Thompson was inundated with comments about it. The story was recounted around the globe, and several experts waded in with their explanations.
Former chicken farmer Colette Francis saw the post and had an extraordinary theory. She believes that a chicken might have eaten the faux gem, which then passed through the animal’s digestive system before ending up as a part of the shell.
« Basically, the shell coating goes on last and doesn’t harden until it hits the air, » she commented. « In this case, it could be: chicken swallows diamond, diamond gets stuck at intestine exit, egg picks up diamond on way out, » she added. « It’s rare, but it happens. »
Francis even suggested she’d seen it before, albeit on only two occasions. « It doesn’t hurt the bird and could be 1 in 10 million eggs, » Francis continued. « I’ve only seen two or three in a lifetime, so it’s something that’s worth keeping. It’s amazing what you find in eggs. »
But others were more skeptical about how it could have taken place. Daniel Brown, an egg farmer in Yorkshire in the north of England, told the Daily Mail, « In all my years, I’ve never heard of anything quite like that. In my opinion, yes, it’s possible that it could have passed through the chicken, but it’s very unlikely. I’ve never known a lump of any kind of stone to go into an egg. »
However the diamond-like stone got there, Thompson is determined to make the most of it. And because she was so sure that no one would present themselves as the stone’s owner, she planned to put the jewelry in her headpiece on her wedding day.
Moreover, the find turned out to be a case of the goose that laid the golden egg in the supermarket chain where Thompson bought the eggs. Or should that be the chicken that laid the cubic zirconia? A representative from Asda told the Daily Mail, « Our customers can always expect more for their money. »
Meanwhile, the internet is peppered with stories of real gems turning up in strange places. Some examples include diamonds apparently found in oysters and precious stones scattered on riverbeds. However, it’s hard to verify if these happened as a result of camera trickery or whether they were indeed a bonafide haul.
But in this case, maybe just maybe, a chicken really did eat a stone that had fallen from a farmworker’s jewelry, and somehow it then ended up in its egg. If so, how apt that the person to find the tiny treasure was a blushing bride on the verge of a new life.