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Pearls have fascinated people all over the world for hundreds and hundreds of years. They have magic and mystique, a warmth and glow, and are the only gem created by a living organism.
Pearls are found in pearl oysters, although it wasn’t until the late 19th century that people fully understood how pearls were created. It was then that the relationship between pearl oysters and parasites was discovered.
It is when a foreign body of some sort, such as a grain of sand or a parasite finds its way into the oyster that it reacts. It coats the irritant with layer upon layer of the pearly substance known as ‘nacre’, and this gives the pearl its unique appearance and iridescent beauty.
This is the natural pearl, but its rarity and high price could not satisfy the demands of the consumers. What was needed was a way to guarantee a steady supply, and this lead to the discovery of the cultured pearl.
Culturing is a way to entice oysters to produce round pearls on demand. In this case, humans rather than nature introduce the irritant. The secret is to insert a piece of oyster epithelial membrane (the lip of mantle tissue) with a nucleus of shell or metal, into an oyster’s body. This causes the tissue to form a pearl sack, and that sack then secretes nacre to coat the nucleus, thus creating a pearl. |
Types of Pearls
Chimere cultured pearls are commonly known as Black Pearls; concretions that are secreted inside the black-lipped Pinctada Margaritifera species of pearl oysters and cultivated in the lagoons of Western Australia's Abrolhos Islands.
Freshwater Pearls are found in mussels or oysters in rivers, lakes and ponds and tend to be more irregular in shape and more varied in colour than pearls found in saltwater oysters.
Akoya Pearls
Saltwater pearls from the Akoya oyster (Pinctada fucata martensi), which are usually cultured. These pearls are typically roundish and their natural body colours range from light pink, to white, to yellowish.
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Black Pearls
Pearls of natural colour (not dyed) from the black-lip (Pinctata margaritifera) oyster in the Western to Central Pacific Ocean or from the La Paz pearl oyster (Pinctata mazatlanica) or rainbow-lipped oyster (Pteria sterna) in the Eastern Pacific between Baja California and Peru.
South Sea Pearls
Used sometimes as a general tern signifying any saltwater pearl found in the area extending from the Phillipines and Indonesia down to Australia and across to French Polynesia. More often than not, it refers specifically to large white or yellow pearls cultured in the Pinctada maxima oyster - a large oyster found in the South Seas, also called the silver-lip or yellow-lip (also gold-lip) oyster depending on the colour of it's shell lip. |