What is Cultured Pearl
 As you might have already known by now, pearls are formed whenever an
irritant invades the inner core of a mollusk. In reaction to this
irritation, the mollusk secretes a substance called nacre, coats the
irritant in concentric layers until a pearl is formed. Pearls can be natural
or cultured, the first one being made purely in the wild, naturally and
without any intervention from man. A cultured pearl still comes from a
mollusk, albeit made through the assistance of man, in order to produce
better quality pearls in greater numbers under controlled conditions.
Natural pearls were once the only pearls people had – they were produced by
a select species of mollusks in the wild, and are usually formed by chance.
In order to harvest more pearls, pearl seekers needed to gather each and
every oyster they can find as not all of them will contain a pearl. This
resulted to a major decline in the population of pearl-producing oysters,
and is the reason why they are much rarer nowadays. By producing a cultured
pearl, the extremely hard task of searching for naturally-occurring pearls
in the wild is eliminated and also gives us a renewable source of quality
pearls.
The cultured pearl we know nowadays is a result of the painstaking research
and hard work done by the Japanese scientists Tokishi Nishikawa, Tatsuhei
Mise and Kokichi Mikimoto between the 19th and 20th century. In this time,
there were already other communities which were able to make mollusks
produce pearls through artificial means, but the resulting pearl are just
mabe/blister. The Japanese scientists were able to perfect a technique which
results in a perfectly round pearl – this technique was then immediately
patented by Kokichi Mikimoto in 1916.
With this new discovery, the pearl industry was taken to a whole new level,
with pearl farmers now able to harvest superior quality pearls in great
numbers. Unlike rare natural pearls which come in many random sizes, shapes
and grades, a cultured pearl can easily be programmed to produce virtually
perfect-shaped and superior grade pearls. It also gave farmers the chance to
properly monitor the oysters all throughout the pearl production process.
Most importantly, it enabled pearls to be produced in a very large scale,
causing costs to go down significantly and allowing more people to afford
them.
A cultured pearl can either be freshwater or saltwater. Freshwater pearls
are formed inside freshwater mussels and are primarily harvested from China,
although limited quantities may be available in the US and Japan. Saltwater
pearls obviously come from the sea, the most popular being the Akoya pearls
– these are perfectly round pearls albeit limited to a maximum of 10mm in
size. Another example is the Tahitian pearl, which is harvested in the
French Polynesia and the only one having a natural black color (with a wide
range of overtones as well) and can range from 9-16mm in size. The most
expensive and biggest pearls are the South Sea pearls from Indonesia and
Australia. Although these pearls rarely have a perfectly round shape, they
can grow to a maximum size of up to 20mm and have thick nacre, exceptional
luster and come in a wide range of colors too.
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