Pearls - Soft, Shiny, And Alluring

The finest quality natural pearls have been highly valued as gemstones and objects of beauty for many centuries. Due to this, pearls have become a metaphor for something rare, fine, admirable, and valuable. Here, Dr Pradeep Kumar Mukherjee discusses the process of creation of natural pearls and the cultured pearls, and also highlights the reasons why pearls fit different tastes and attract so many different people.

- Dr Pradeep Kumar Mukherjee

No one knows who first pulled a shiny white pearl from the shell of a mollusc, but we know that pearls have been worn as jewellery for more than 50,000 years. They remain the world’s most sought-after gems and are revered as symbol of female energy, love, wisdom and, importantly, wealth.

The millennia-old tradition of diving for oysters using weighted ropes, neck baskets, and wooden nose clips has now, with a few exceptions, been replaced by more precise pearl farming methods through which cultured pearls are obtained.

Creation of Natural Pearl

A natural pearl is created when some foreign matter finds its way inside an oyster or a mollusc. They would defend themselves by blasting this foreign body with layers of nacre, which is a shelllike tissue more commonly known as mother-of-pearl. Over time, these nacre layers build up and a pearl is formed. The scientists recently discovered that a number of the older, natural pearls were formed not due to the foreign body getting trapped into the oyster or mollusc but from the excrement of passing fish that got trapped in the shells of water-filtering molluscs.

The Cultured Pearls

The cultured pearl first emerged in Japan. A young Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto successfully established the procedure in the 1980s. It involved strategically inserting a tiny piece of shell into a mature oyster, then waiting for a period, that varied from six months to five years, before harvesting the pearls.

It took Mikimoto another 30 years to achieve a commercially viable harvest. His company, Mikimoto, named after him, is still one of the famous names in the pearl industry.