It continues doing this, and the irritant grows into a shiny pearl. Cultured pearls are formed by the same process, but instead of the irritant entering the shell accidentally, it's put there ...

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 ...

This long cultivation process makes South Sea pearls rarer ... More from Retail South Sea pearls are the largest cultured-pearl variety, sometimes reaching over 20 millimeters in diameter.

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 ...

This creates a material called nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl, which encases the irritant and protects the mollusc from it. When pearls are cultured commercially an irritant is manually inserted ...

For at least 164,000 years, oysters have been part of the human diet, but people have been finding pearls in oysters for much longer — as early as 2300 BC when Chinese royalty received them as ...

The world's first cultured pearls were born in Ise-Shima in Mie Prefecture. On this episode of Journeys in Japan, Do Minh Khai from Vietnam explores the Ise-Shima area, the home of magical pearls.