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.