What Makes a Pearl

Whether organic or cultivated, fundamentally it is nature that is responsible for crafting each pearl. As such, every pearl is unique. Human intervention can assist this process but only up to a point. Ultimately, a pearl’s qualities are ecologically determined.

For many years, scholars proposed that pearls were formed when an irritant such as a grain of sand becomes trapped in a mollusc causing it to create a hard nucleus and coat it with many layers of nacre or crystallized calcium carbonate (mother of pearl).

Science has now shown that a pearl is formed when a mollusc’s mantle tissue suffers an injury and undergoes a process of bio-mineralisation. In an attempt to heal, the mantle creates a cyst and secretes calcium carbonate into this ‘pearl-sac’ which in turn creates a pearl.