A small cloisonné pin, purchased by a Roseville, Michigan girl, whose family wishes to remain anonymous, has suddenly begun to discolor in a mysterious way.  The girl, an art student at a local community college,  said that on December 23, she noticed a pinkishness on the side of the artist's face in the ear area. She had just reread a September 22, 2000, Detroit News account of the success of the "Face to Face" exhibit at the  Detroit Institute of Arts which pumped a surprising $93 million into the city's economy.  She said she was thinking about the troubled Dutch artist who struggled in poverty to express the beauty of everyday life with love and joy to the common man.  She went to her room to look at a poster of the artist she had bought  at the van Gogh exhibit at the same time she acquired the pin.  She didn't think anything of the discoloration then but she reported that the color deepened and darkened with time, obscuring the ear and also started to appear on van Gogh`s shirt under his ear.
John Witherspoon, head of the D.I.A.'s gift shop which sold hundreds of the pin says he has received no reports of similar claims and states that the pins are manufactured in China by the Xonex Company. Cloisonné' is a jewelry technique of fusing glass to metal.   Carol Forsyth, objects expert with the conservation department at the D.I.A.,  said there is no possibility of an interaction between glass and brass, the metal in the van Gogh pin, that would produce a reddish substance in or on the surface of the glass.