Out of all the gems used in jewellery manufacture pearls are the only precious material that come from a living organism. Thankfully organisms that don’t have feeling but can produce life. Almost 100% of pearls are cultured today, natural pearls only account for 1/1000th percent of pearls that are marketable today.

Cultured pearls are grown on either saltwater or freshwater pearl farms. Depending on the size of pearl oysters are cared for and farmed for 2 to 5 years. Like any other livestock these farms are effected by weather, pollution, disease and other man-made or natural interferences. Entire beds of oysters can be wiped out, decimating years of growth and work.

While some oysters are still collected in the sea, most large scale pearl producers grow their own. This allows them to breed high quality oysters that they know produce above standard pearls with others that are equally strong. Similar to breeding horses for racing or pure- bred dogs. The farmers collect oyster sperm and eggs from the above-ordinary oysters and fertilize them to create baby oyster larvae.

Cute, but gross.

In the wild baby larvae would attach themselves to rocks and shells randomly in the ocean. Pearl farmers allow the baby larvae to float freely in a controlled area and provide little rocks for them to attach to. After a few months the larvae develop in baby oysters and moved to another area of the farm, the ‘nursery’. These babies then grow and are watched over for 1-2 years. Once they are the correct size they can be nucleated which requires a lil surgery. Reminder they have no feeling or brain.

Nucleation, sounds super complicated, and was very difficult in the beginning. Shout out to Kokichi Mikimoto in Japan who grew up on a family of noodle makers but who persisted and persisted, nearly losing everything, but developed cultured pearl farming as we know it today ( full story later babies). Basically a small cut is made a a foreign object is implanted in the oyster. It causes irritation which the oyster counteracts by secreting nacre (mother of pearl) around it which makes a pearl. People always talk of a grain of sand being the started of a pearl, while this happens occasionally it was more likely to be a seaworm or some sort of aquatic insect. The oyster basically detects an infection and covers it in secretions, the way our skin scars over a wound. So pearls basically a pretty scar covered was-a-bug. Yummy.

Some oysters will reject and expel the implanted nuclei, some will become sick and die. But most survive and are able to produce 24-32 pearls in a culturing cycle.

The trick that Mikimoto discovered was that in nature a piece of the ‘mantle’ was implanted with the nuclei/irritation. This part of the oyster is close to the edge. Naturally if a little bug or sand grain were to get in the oyster it would have had to pass this bit and by the time they got to the centre a bit of mantle would still be stuck to them. This combo equals pearl.

There is saltwater and freshwater nucleation. Saltwater uses a started bead – so a small prepreped lil bead of mother of pearl which is surrounded by mantle tissue from a donor oyster. The bead and tissue are then inserted into the oyster’s gonad (yikes). The pearl then grows from this little starter mold and adds layers so becomes a bigger version of the bead, so will take on the shape if the bead were strangely shaped.

Freshwater are used with only mantle tissue, no bead. The mantle tissue from oyster one is put into a cut made in oyster two’s mantle tissue instead of the gonad. The oyster detects this weird implantation and protects itself by covering it in mother-of-pearl – thus pearl baby. They need to recover from surgery and are placed in nets and cages and moved to the main oyster bed where they chill. Depending on the type of pearl, size wanted and other variables they stay here for a few months to a few years.

Once they are fully grown they are harvested, so extracted from the oysters, washed, dried and sorted. The oyster meat can be eaten. If the pearls need a bit of polishing they can be tumbled in salt and water. Then they are sold to one day sit on your lobes.

Pretty Ugly- Pearls