Pearls
History and Reputation
It is not clear exactly when pearls were first discovered, but they have been revered for centuries for their beauty and rarity. Hundreds of pearl oysters or pearl mussels have to be caught, killed and opened in order to find just one pearl, and for centuries this led to pearls being sold at extremely high prices. This classical notion of a pearl’s rarity is responsible for their metaphorical quality - when a person or an object is referred to as a “pearl”, the metaphor describes that person or object as something rare, very fine and highly valuable.
Pearls have throughout time attained an association with romance, fertility, power and even good health, as ancient Egyptian, Chinese and Japanese medicines often included ground up pearls.
High-quality pearls are considered gemstones, and are produced naturally by living mollusks, such as oysters, clams and mussels.
Natural Pearls
When a microscopic irritant such as sand, a parasite or any foreign object enters a mollusk, the organism secretes multiple thin layers of a mucus-like substance known as “nacre”, in order to cover the invading object and thus protect the organism. Nacre is composed of calcium carbonate, and the continual layering of this substance creates the round shape of pearls. Perfectly spherical pearls are rarely found in nature, as the irregular shape of the irritant is what forms the basis of the nacre deposits. Rather, natural pearls are usually misshapen, or baroque. It is practically impossible to produce commercial quantities of spherical natural pearls.
Cultured Pearls
Due to the extreme rarity and difficulty in finding pearls in nature, most pearls on the market today are cultured, meaning the irritant was implanted into the mollusk by human intervention. Pearl farmers insert a piece of mantle tissue or a round mother of pearl shell into the soft tissue of an oyster, and the same nacre-coating process begins. Although a human hand aids in the introduction, the mollusk still creates the pearl naturally through the same nacre-coating process. Pearl farmers constantly care for their cultured pearls, which take several years to grow – on average, from two to six years.
Pearl Types
Pearls are identified according to their origin, mollusk species, and freshwater versus saltwater classification. When assessing a pearl’s value, one must consider six categories: size, roundness, nacre thickness, luster, color and cleanliness.
Freshwater cultured pearls are the closest thing on the market to natural pearls and have the highest nacre content of all cultured pearls, creating a more durable pearl.
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