Pearls

Pearls symbolize honesty, wisdom, purity, innocence, integrity and serenity. Pearls can stimulate your femininity; they lift your spirits and make you feel beautiful. Pearls foster motherly love and ensure good health and longevity. With their humble beginnings as a grain of sand and slowly transformed over time into an object of value and beauty, they help us get in touch with the simple things in life.

Physically, pearls aid with the heart, digestion and stomach, and with the immune system.

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, however. In fact, in a haul of three tons, only three or four oysters will produce perfect pearls.

Now, however, almost all pearls used for jewelry are cultured by planting a core or nucleus into pearl oysters. The pearls are usually harvested three years after the planting, but it can take up to as long as six years before a pearl is produced. Pearls are formed inside the shell of certain bivalve mollusks. As a response to an irritating object inside its shell, the mollusk will deposit layers of calcium carbonate and conchiolin which forms nacre, or as most of us know it, mother-of-pearl.

The unique luster of pearls depends upon the reflection and refraction of light from the translucent layers and is finer in proportion as the layers become thinner and more numerous. The iridescence that some pearls display is caused by the overlapping of successive layers, which breaks up light falling on the surface.

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. Pearls come in eight basic shapes: round, semi-round, button, drop, pear, oval, baroque, and ringed. Large, perfectly round pearls are rare and highly valued.




Glossary