Pearl Education on Pearls
Pearls are organic gems, created and derived from a living organism. Formation of pearls is a natural process that covers a foreign object with beautiful layers upon layers of nacre. For centuries, men use to dive deep in seawater to bring out natural pearls but now. The new culturing techniques have it made it simple to harvest them in pearl farms. It takes 2 to5 years for this natural beauty to grow with little or no human help.
China is the biggest producer of pearls that are cultured in mussels in freshwater.
Shell beads are placed inside the oysters and the oysters then are placed in sea or rivers and lakes to grow naturally over a period of time. During the process of formation, the oysters cover the bead with layers of nacre - popularly known as bead nucleating technology. Most cultured pearls are produced in China and Japan. Some pearls do come form the South Pacific as larger oysters produce South Sea cultured pearls and Tahitian black cultured pearls from the French Polynesian islands.
The best quality finest pearls are flawless, very clean and shiny. The quality of pearls is evaluated by the orient, which is the soft iridescence caused by the refraction of light by the multi layers of nacre, luster, the reflectivity and the brilliant shininess of the surface. Overall the value of any pearl jewelry is based on the shape, size, pearl type and color. Many pearls have rose or silver overtones and are preferred.
It is hard to distinguish between imitation and cultured pearls but microscopic test surely can tell the difference. Pearls are graded from A to AAA and the top of the line quality pearls has AAA ratings. There are four types of pearls - freshwater pearls, akoya seawater pearls, Tahitian pearls and South sea pearls and each type are priced differently. Freshwater and akoya are the most affordable ones.
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