Natural pearls

posted on 8 March 2011 | posted in Fashion

In nature almost any mollusk with a shell can produce some kind of pearl naturally when an irritant becomes trapped in the mollusk’s mantle folds – most of these however could not be classed as gemstones. Nacreous pearls which are the best known commercially available pearls are produced by 2 groups of mollusks – bivalves and clams. A natural pearl is one that forms spontaneously in the wild without any human intervention. Many oysters or pearls would have to be gathered in the wild to find a single pearl and this is why they could fetch such large prices. However cultured pearls are produced in a pearl farm where humans intervene in the production process by introducing the irritant to the mollusk so that a pearl, or even several pearls can be produced by each mussel which has brought the price of pearls down to very reasonable levels so that freshwater pearl jewellery can be bought very easily today.