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About Pearls

“Pearls are timeless because they flatter us all bringing out the buttery sheen of young skin as well as lending a soft glow to older complexions”

A pearl is a hard, roundish object produced within the soft tissue of a living shelled mollusk. Just like the shell of mollusks, a pearl is composed of calcium carbonate in minute crystalline form, which has been deposited in concentric layers. The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes of pearls occur.

The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries, and because of this, the word pearl became a metaphor for something very rare, very fine, very admirable and very valuable.

Nacreous pearls, the most desirable pearls, are produced by two groups of molluscan bivalves or clams. One family lives in the sea: the pearl oysters. The other, very different group of bivalves live in freshwater, and these are the freshwater pearl mussel.

History of pearls

As soon as the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Western Hemisphere they discovered that around the islands of Cubagua and Margarita, some 200 km north of the Venezuelan coast, was the most exquisite bed of pearls they had seen. One of them, the Peregrina, was offered to the Spanish queens, the same pearl, an elongated one, that became very famous when Richard Burton purchased it and gave it to his wife Elizabeth Taylor. Margarita pearls are extremely difficult to find today, they have an exquisite yellowish colour and are certainly unique and far better than others. The most famous Margarita necklace that any one can see today is the one that then Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt gave as a gift to Jaqueline Kennedy when she and her husband, President John F. Kennedy paid an official visit to Venezuela.

Before the beginning of the 20th Century, pearl hunting was the most common way of harvesting pearls. Divers manually pulled oysters from ocean floors and river bottoms and checked them individually for pearls. Not all natural oysters produce pearls. In a haul of three tons, only three or four oysters will produce perfect pearls. However, almost all pearls used for jewellery are cultured by planting a core or nucleus into pearl oysters. The pearls are usually harvested after one year for Akoya, and 2-4 years for Tahitian and South Sea, and 2-7 years for freshwater.

Saltwater and Freshwater pearls

Freshwater and saltwater pearls may sometimes look quite similar, but they come from very different sources.

Saltwater pearls can grow in several species of marine pearl oysters. Freshwater pearls grow within certain (but by no means all) species of freshwater mussels. These various species of bivalves are able to make nacreous pearls because they have a thick iridescent inner shell layer called “mother of pearl”, which is composed of nacre. The mantle tissue of a living bivalve can create a pearl in the same manner that it creates the pearly inner layer of the shell.

Freshwater pearls form in various species of freshwater mussels, which live in lakes, rivers, ponds and other bodies of fresh water. These freshwater pearl mussels occur not only in hotter climates, but also in colder more temperate areas such as Scotland. However, most freshwater cultured pearls sold today come from China.

Natural and Cultured pearls

A nacreous pearl is made from layers of nacre, by the same living process as is used in the secretion of the mother of pearl which lines the shell. A "natural pearl" is one that formed without any human intervention at all, in the wild, and is very rare. A "cultured pearl", on the other hand, is one that has been formed on a pearl farm. The great majority of pearls on the market are cultured pearls.

Natural Pearls

The difference between natural and cultured pearls focuses on whether the pearl was created spontaneously by nature — without human intervention — or with human aid. Natural pearls are very rare and it is thought that they form under a set of accidental conditions when a microscopic intruder or parasite enters a bivalve mollusk, and settles inside the shell. Natural pearls come in many shapes, with round ones being comparatively rare.

Fine gem-quality saltwater and freshwater pearls can and do sometimes occur completely naturally, but this is rare. Many hundreds of pearl oysters or pearl mussels have to be gathered and opened, and thus killed, in order to find even one pearl, and for many centuries that was the only way pearls were obtained. This was the main reason why pearls fetched such extraordinary prices in the past.

Quality natural pearls are very rare jewels. The actual value of a natural pearl is determined in the same way as it would be for other "precious" gems. The valuation factors include size, shape, and quality of surface, orient and luster.

Single natural pearls are often sold as a collector's item, or set as centerpieces in unique jewelry. Very few matched strands of natural pearls exist, and those that do often sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yachtsman and financier Cartier purchased the landmark Cartier store on Fifth Avenue in New York for $100 cash and a double strand of matched natural pearls valued at $1 million.

Cultured pearls

A cultured pearl is created by a pearl farmer under controlled conditions. In modern times almost all the pearls for sale are formed with a good deal of expert intervention from human pearl farmers.

Although the Japanese freshwater pearl industry has nearly ceased to exist, it does hold special historic value as the first country to cultivate whole freshwater pearls. Today China is the main commercial producer of freshwater pearls.

Imitation pearls

Imitation or fake pearls are also widely sold in inexpensive jewellery, but the quality of the iridescence is usually very poor, and generally speaking, fake pearls are usually quite easy to distinguish from the real thing.

Natural and cultured pearls can be distinguished from imitation pearls using a microscope. Another method of testing for imitations is to rub the pearl against the surface of a front tooth. Imitation pearls are completely smooth, but natural and cultured pearls are composed of nacre platelets, which feel slightly gritty. Also, real pearls are heavy for their size whereas imitation pearls are not.

Pearl quality

The value of the pearls in jewelry is determined by a combination of the luster, color, size, lack of surface flaw and symmetry that are appropriate for the type of pearl under consideration. Among those attributes, luster is the most important differentiator of pearl quality according to jewelers. All factors being equal, however, the larger the pearl the more valuable it is. Large, perfectly round pearls are rare and highly valued.

Pearl Shapes

Pearls come in eight basic shapes: round, semi-round, button, drop, pear, oval, baroque, and circled. Perfectly round pearls are the rarest and most valuable shape. Semi-rounds are also used in necklaces or in pieces where the shape of the pearl can be disguised to look like it is a perfectly round pearl. Button pearls are like a slightly flattened round pearl and can also make a necklace, but are more often used in single pendants or earrings where the back half of the pearl is covered, making it look like a larger, round pearl.

Drop and pear shaped pearls are sometimes referred to as teardrop pearls and are most often seen in earrings, pendants, or as a center pearl in a necklace. Baroque pearls have a different appeal to them than more standard shapes because they are often highly irregular and make unique and interesting shapes. They are also commonly seen in necklaces. Circled pearls are characterized by concentric ridges, or rings, around the body of the pearl.

Pearl colours

Pearls are often white or cream, but the color can vary significantly according to the natural color of the nacre in the various species of mollusk used. Thus pearls can also be shades of black or various pastel shades.

In addition, pearls (especially freshwater pearls) can be dyed yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, purple, or black.

Lengths of pearl necklaces

There is a special vocabulary used to describe the length of pearl necklaces. While most other necklaces are simply referred to by their physical measurement, pearl necklaces are named by how low they hang when worn around the neck. A collar sits directly against the throat and does not hang down the neck at all; collars are often made up of multiple strands of pearls. Pearl chokers nestle just at the base of the neck. The size called a princess comes down to or just below the collarbone. A matinee of pearls falls just above the breasts. An opera will be long enough to reach the breastbone or sternum of the wearer, and longer still, a pearl rope is any length that falls down farther than an opera.