cultured pearl

cultured pearl, natural but cultivated pearl produced by a mollusk after the intentional introduction of a foreign object inside the creature’s shell. The discovery that such pearls could be cultivated in freshwater mussels is said to have been made in 13th-century China, and the Chinese have been adept for hundreds of years at cultivating pearls by opening the mussel’s shell and inserting into it small pellets of mud or tiny bosses of wood, bone, or metal and returning the mussel to its bed for about three years to await the maturation of a pearl formation. Cultured pearls of China have been almost exclusively blister pearls (hemispherical pearls formed attached to the mussel’s shell), which are filled with resin and capped with a flat piece of nacre (mother-of-pearl) to become a mabe pearl or pearl doublet.

The production of whole cultured pearls was perfected by the Japanese. The research that led to the establishment of the industry was started in the 1890s by Mikimoto Kōkichi, who, after long experimentation, concluded that a very small mother-of-pearl bead introduced into the mollusk’s tissue was the most successful stimulant to pearl production. It possesses the added virtue of providing a pearl entirely of nacreous content. Cultured pearls closely approximate natural pearls. If the covering of nacre is too thin, however, it will deteriorate upon prolonged contact with the acids of the human body and eventually will reveal the mother-of-pearl matrix.

Once a shore-based activity, pearl farms now generally use a vessel as an operating platform. Immature pearl oyster shells (usually Pinctada fucata or Pteria penguin in Japan and Pinctada maxima in Australia) are reserved in barrels until maturation (2 to 3 years) and, when the shells reach certain size, are implanted with a tiny polished sphere of mother-of-pearl. The implanted oysters are suspended in wire nets from floating rafts or contained in some other way and are tended by divers until they are ready for harvesting; readiness is often determined by X-ray.

Northern Australia established its first pearl farms in the 1960s, principally with Japanese collaboration, and by the mid-1970s they were an established industry, producing pearl shell as well as pearls. Japan and Australia are the largest producers of cultured pearls, though Fiji also produces some.