The affordability and popularity of pearls in fashion jewelry

Through the ages, pearls have been widely used in jewelry for girls and ladies. Pearl necklaces are the quintessential fashion jewelry, and have been valued possessions for hundreds of years. In fact, the term "pearl" is synonymous with fine, rare and valuable. In the past, pearls were used to adorn costumes. However, because of the high cost of pearls, this was confined to royalty and other wealthy families. Today though, the use of pearls is largely confined to the jewelry industry. The popularity of pearls can largely be attributed to their luster and iridescence. In some rare instances, pearls today are also incorporated into cosmetics.

Pearls develop within the soft tissue or mantle of a mollusk or oyster. When a foreign body or an irritant such as a parasite or sand particle enters the shell, the mollusk secretes a material to coat the irritant in fine layers. This is a defensive mechanism. The coating is called "nacre", and is a fine crystalline calcium carbonate held together by an organic glue. The nacre gradually increases in size and hardens, forming the pearl that we know. Through the 20th century, the introduction of the irritant to trigger pearl development was left solely up to Nature. These pearls were and are referred to as "natural" pearls. Divers would dive down to the bottom of the seas to harvest oysters from pearl beds. The oysters would be pried open and the creature killed in order to collect the pearl. A large number of mollusks were destroyed in order to find just a few pearls, making natural pearls quite expensive. A single round, natural pearl today is a collector's item, and a single strand necklace of natural matched pearls can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The affordability and popularity of pearls in fashion jewelry today can be directly traced back to a process called "periculture". Periculture is process used to create cultured pearls. The stimulus needed to trigger pearl development is provided by man. An external irritant such as a small bead or tissue from a "donor" mollusk is inserted into the mantle of the host oyster or mollusk. Each host oyster can have up to a dozen such insertions, resulting in a dozen or more pearls from each host. Pearl farms in Asia (primarily China) now mass produce cultured pearls. Cultured pearls are much cheaper than natural pearls, and therefore very popular for fashion jewelry.

Pearls are generally white or light cream in color, although a wide variety of colors are also available in the market today. The color of the pearl depends on the mollusk that produces the pearl. Dark colored pearls such as Tahitian pearls are rare and therefore quite expensive. All other properties being equal, larger pearls are more expensive than smaller pearls. Pearls can generally be found in eight basic shapes: round, semi-round, button, drop, pear, oval, baroque, and circled. Perfectly round pearls are the rarest and most valuable. Semi-rounds are also used in necklaces or in pieces where the shape of the pearl can be disguised to look like it is a perfectly round pearl. Button pearls are like a slightly flattened round pearl and can also make a necklace. Drop and pear shaped pearls are largely used in pendants and earrings.