What are pearls?
Pearls are the result of a defensive mechanism used by certain mollusks, such as oysters and mussels, when an irritant finds it’s way into their shells. This irritant could be a tiny burrowing crab or a piece of sand, almost anything for that matter.
The mollusk will then defend itself from this irritant by covering the foreign object with layer after layer of hard nacre (pronounced nay-ker). Nacre is a naturally iridescent substance that can be made in a huge range of colours which also lines some mollusks’ shells. These shells have been used for centuries as Mother of Pearl to make jewellery, posh buttons and furniture inlay amongst other things. So when something finds it’s way into a mollusk and is then covered by nacre over a period of about three to ten years the resulting lustrous object that comes out is called a pearl.
Cultured Pearls or Natural Pearls?
We know about how pearls are made and what they’re made of but what about the difference between natural and cultured pearls? There’s a lot of confusion about this, in the 25 years we’ve been going, hundreds of people have asked us, are cultured pearls real, or, are they as good? To answer this we have to look at the history of pearling, the difference between the two production methods and the pearls themselves. Here’s a brief overview under those very headings…
The History of Pearling
There’s evidence of our great love of pearls going all the way back to the beginning of recorded history with ancient cultures treasuring the pearls which had been growing in the massive oyster and mussel beds for millions of years. We can see how Western cultures started to acquire pearls as they began trading with the East and how our Kings and Queens adorned themselves with these precious gems. This appreciation has never stopped and every discovery of new pearl beds (such as Columbus’s discovery of Mexican pearls during his third trip to the New World) resulted in frenzied pearl diving in order to reap the rewards of the highly valuable, organic gems from the water.
However, by the end of the 19th century we’d become so efficient that we’d started to deplete the world’s natural pearl producing mollusks. Pearl divers were over-fishing mollusks from Australian saltwater oysters to North American freshwater mussels. About one in every thousand oysters picked from the ocean floor will contain a natural pearl of gem quality. Therefore to make a standard length necklace of 50 pearls required, on average, 50,000 oysters to be removed from the oyster beds. Hence their rapid decline from over-fishing. When cultured, more than 99% of the mollusks will contain pearls and some can grow up to 50 pearls at a time. By the early 20th century we had either over-fished or polluted the worlds’ mollusk beds to the point of extinction all over the world. (For example, oil drilling wiped out nearly all Middle Eastern oyster beds).
Public demand for pearls continued despite the rapid decline of natural pearls being found, to fulfil this need three ingenious Japanese men developed a technique of culturing pearls from oysters and so by the 1920s we were able to sustainably quench our desire for pearls without further depleting the worlds natural oyster beds. Pearl culturing meant that, rather than destroying valuable natural ecosystems, they became actively preserved. Pearl farms require clean water and so the farmers make considerable efforts to look after them, creating areas of outstanding biodiversity and natural beauty.
In light of this, we think it’s fair to say that the invention of cultured pearls has both saved pearl production from extinction and given such a value to the natural environment where they’re grown that it’s protected and encouraged to blossom.
The Method of Pearl Culturing
A cultured pearl is a pearl that started growing because the irritant that entered the shell was put there by a person, rather than entering it randomly. Other than that natural pearls and cultured pearls are made in the same way. The mollusk doesn’t know if the irritant was put there by a person, it carries out its defence mechanism the same way in either instance, i.e. it covers the irritant with the same nacre.
The Pearls themselves
There’s no question that there’s a fascinating appeal to natural pearls as they are a product of pure chance and also very, very rare. However, so long as the nacre is thick enough so that you can’t see the bead in the middle, you can’t see any difference between a natural pearl and a cultured pearl. Natural pearls are now so rare that they are exponentially more expensive then a cultured pearl of the equal size, shape, colour and quality. For example, the natural Baroda Pearl collection recently sold at Christies for US$7,800,000 whereas a strand of comparable quality cultured pearls would probably be valued at around £1,000, quite a difference!
To summarise
We’ve gone on a bit about cultured pearls and natural pearls because we know that it can be pretty confusing, we’ve heard so many people say that these lovely pearls aren’t natural as if it’s a bad thing, when we really don’t think it is. The quality of cultured pearls today is far better than the average natural pearl that was found. The pearl industry wouldn’t exist today if it wasn’t for cultured pearls, we would only be trading the old ones that were found years and years ago.
We love cultured pearls, we’ve only really touched on the positive impact that cultured pearl farms can have, we’ve saved the rest for later in the environmental bit.
So, we feel that cultured pearls are good for the environment whereas natural pearl diving was damaging (and is now actually banned in many parts of the world) and the cultured pearls that are grown today are generally of a far better quality than their natural counterparts.
On one last point, having hopefully clarified the difference between cultured pearls and natural pearls, we do however want to say one more thing. Shell based beads and plastic beads aren’t pearls. People don’t call cubic zirconias diamonds, brass gold or steel platinum, so why do people get away with calling synthetic beads, pearls? We don’t like it, so we won’t do it. All of our pearls are cultured or natural, i.e. they’re pearls.
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