Natural pearls grow in the wild without human intervention. They are very rare, and most natural pearls in the market today are antique. Cultured pearls are grown in pearl farms, and are the direct ...

Now we see pearls almost as accessories, relatively inexpensive decorations to accompany more costly gemstones. Before the creation of cultured pearls in the early 1900s, natural pearls were so ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

Figure 1. A parcel of natural pen pearls surrounds a 6.92 ct non-nacreous beaded cultured pearl. Photo by Olivier Segura. The Laboratoire Français de Gemmologie (LFG) recently had the opportunity to ...

Natural versus cultured. Natural pearls are hard to find. They're rare, and this makes them worth more money. But let's rewind for a second. What is a natural pearl, and how are they formed?

An curved arrow pointing right. South Sea pearls are the largest cultured-pearl variety, sometimes reaching over 20 millimeters in diameter. The Pinctada maxima oyster can take up to five years to ...

Produced by oysters in oceans or mussels in rivers, pearls have been coveted by humans since the Bronze Age. So much so that it is believed the exploitation of freshwater pearls was a factor in the ...

After Mikimoto founder Kokichi Mikimoto invented cultured pearl technology, it made pearls accessible to the masses. Mikimoto’s goal was “to adorn the necks of all women around the world with ...

The film guides us through history, beginning at 1,000 BC, and taking into account Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Victorian era, the jazz age, the importance of pearls in Chinese and ...

When pearls are cultured commercially an irritant is manually inserted into a mollusc to promote the production of mother-of-pearl. Nacre can form naturally around almost any irritant that gets inside ...