What is a Pearl?

I am often asked to explain what a pearl really is. Is it a grain of sand? What is it made of? Are Majorica Pearls real? Cultured? What is the difference between a natural or cultured? Are cultured pearls real? Why do they have different colours? Are they “fed” chemicals to obtain colours? Are they “painted”?

So... what is a pearl?

"A Pearl is a living gem, and each pearl is a miracle of nature"

A pearl is formed by layers of translucent mother of pearl or nacre, which is what gives a pearl its unique iridescence. It takes thousands of very thin layers of nacre to make a single pearl and it is the evenness of these microscopically thin pearly layers that will differentiate a pearl worth thousands of pounds from another worth a few pennies. In any case, it is a remarkable gift of nature that a living oyster produces such an exquisite work of art.

Natural Pearls

Before the depletion of natural pearl beds in the 18th and 19th centuries all pearls were natural, the product of chance without any human intervention, whose beginnings lie in a grain of sand, the larva of a worm, or a speck of coral.
With no shell sphere as its nucleus natural pearls are rarely round or uniform. Therefore roundness and size are integral to the value of a natural pearl. Today natural pearls are exceptionally rare and only seldom seen at auctions in New York or London.

Cultured Pearls

A cultured pearl is the result of human assistance in a natural process. The first cultured pearls were grown some 700 years ago in China by cementing a core to the wall of the oyster shell. Favourites were small lead sculpures of little Buddhas. At the beginning of the 20th century, though depletion of natural oyster beds resulted in a significant scarcity of pearls though depletion of natural oyster beds resulted in a significant scarcity of pearls around the world, demand for the gems remained high. Japan responded by channeling incredible energy into the development of modern pearl culturing techniques.

Kokichi Mikimoto, shortly after he succeeded in culturing a perfectly round pearl, told the world: 

"I would like to adorn the necks of all the women of the world with pearls.

'He seemed to be dreaming of an unachievable dream. In fact, by the 1920s he was marketing his pearls worldwide!!!