Jewelry Pearls

Wearing jewelry has been a way of life for ages. If you look at the early cave paintings, you will find people wearing jewelry that were crudely fashioned from bones of wild animals hunted down. However, as we learnt the use of metal, metallic ornaments started to rule for a while till precious metals were discovered. And then came precious and semi-precious stones and pearls. Slowly pearls began to appear in ornaments that were worn by ladies and young girls. These pearls became a hot favorite with them. Unlike metallic objects or stones, pearls were neither dug out of earth nor were they part of any substance that was physically obtained or chemically produced by man. Pearls can only be found inside a living creature, an oyster. Technically however, it is incorrect to say that oysters are the only variety of mollusk that can produce pearls since clams and mussels are also capable of turning out pearls. However such occurrences are rare.

The birth of pearls is the consequence of a biological process - the oyster’s way of protecting itself from foreign substances entering into its body. To understand the progression, let us take a look into the oyster’s basic anatomy that consists of two shells that are held together by an elastic ligament. The shells function as valves that can open or close at will. Under normal conditions, the valves are kept open for the oyster’s nourishments. An organ called the Mantle is responsible for the growth of the oyster’s shell that uses minerals from the oyster’s food. The material created by the Mantle is known as Nacre that lines the inside of the shells of the oyster.

The formation of pearls begins as soon as foreign bodies slip into the oyster between the Mantle and the shell that irritates the Mantle. The oyster’s natural reaction is to cover up the irritant and as a result, the Mantle covers the irritant with layers of Nacre that eventually forms pearls. Pearls are therefore nothing but a foreign substance that has been covered with multiple layers of Nacre inside an oyster.

Pearls come in various sizes, shapes and colors - white, black, gray, blue, red and green. Pearls are found all over the world, the black variety though, is indigenous to the South Pacific region.

Pearls can be generalized into two varieties. Natural pearls and cultured pearls. The second variety is created through the same principle but requires a little bit of manipulation by the harvester who opens the live oyster shell and cuts a small slit in the mantle tissue to insert an irritant. The rest is the oyster’s job. In fresh water cultured pearls however, no irritants are required, a mere cut in the mantle is enough to induce Nacre secretion for the pearl to develop.

Though there is not much difference in the quality of natural and cultured pearls, natural pearls are more in demand as these pearls are more difficult to obtain.

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