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Just about any pearl you’ll find today
in a store, at a jeweler, or virtually anywhere
else, is a cultured pearl. Cultured pearls are
an effort made by pearl farmers in order to maintain
the delicate balance of nature, while still responding
to the demand for pearls in the jewelry marketplace.
Culturing pearls began at the very beginning of
the 20th century, when several inventors discovered
the techniques required in order to cultivate
pearls. The most famous of these inventors is
a man named Kokichi Mikimoto.
To create the pearl, the farmers introduce a
foreign object, such as a piece of tissue, or
a mother-of-pearl bead, into the mollusk. The
automatic reaction of the mollusk is then to deposit
layers of nacre around the object, in order to
stop it from irritating.
Pearl farmers can create cultured pearls in either
saltwater or freshwater, and in different types of
mollusks.
- Cultured Saltwater Pearls – these are
pearls which are farmed in salt water, and are
grown in oysters. For each oyster, a maximum
of one pearl can be grown. For this reason,
saltwater pearls are much more rare, and therefore
much more expensive than freshwater pearls.
The countries that are best known for producing
cultured saltwater pearls are: Indonesia, Burma,
Thailand, the Philippines, Australia, and Tahiti.
- Cultured Freshwater Pearls – These pearls
are farmed in freshwater, and are grown within
mussels. As the irritants introduced into the
mussels are much smaller than the ones injected
into oysters in saltwater pearls, freshwater
pearls tend to be much smaller than saltwater
pearls. However, the technique for cultivating
freshwater pearls allows for the fact that any
given mussel may produce twenty pearls or more
within one year.
Among the many advantages of cultured pearls
over natural pearls, the fact that ideal environmental
conditions can frequently be provided mean
that it takes a much shorter period of time for
a pearl to be formed at a farm. Still,
pearls can take several years to fully develop and should not be harvested to quickly as to comprimise the quality of the nacre.
For example, South Sea pearls, and Tahitian pearls
will usually take between 2 and 3 years to form.
Akoya pearls from Japan will usually take less
time, at under 2 years. Chinese freshwater pearls
are the shortest, at 18 to 24 months using the
traditional method, and even less time than that
with the latest, most recently developed technologies.
One rule of thumb to which pearl farmers will
hold, however, is that the longer a pearl is left
to form, the larger it will be, and higher quality
will result.
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