Although pearls have been prized for thousands of years, the culturing process only started it’s existence around the 1800’s with the culturing of “blister pearls” and soon replaced the previously popular mother-of-pearl industry. The perfection of the culturing process along with the modern pearl market and international trade industry really only came into its own in the last fifty years and is credited (mostly) to the work of Kokichi Mikimoto and his associates. One of the first Post WWII Japanese entrepreneurs to open stores in the United States, along with major marketing campaigns and creative sales approaches Mikimoto is now a world wide recognizable brand associated with luxury and romance.
More often than not people assume that the term “cultured pearl” is synonymous with “imitation” or otherwise implicates that the pearl is not a genuine one. In reality a cultured pearl is no more or less genuine than one occurring in nature and typically takes much more time, energy and resources to produce. The only differences between the two are rarity and the fact that human intervention began the process of creating the cultured pearl, other than that the rest is all taken care of by the mollusks as in their natural and normal biological processes! Comprised of aragonite, a calcium carbonate crystal, pearls come in a range of natural colors and exhibit wonderful luster that makes them appear as if they glow from within.
The journey that a tiny cultured pearl must take in order to become that sumptuous strand or set of striking earrings is massive and requires work from many nations and hands. For instance, depending on the country, some farmers must grow their own stock of mollusks, raise them to maturity, nucleate the animals with tiny mother-of-pearl beads and wait months, even years to produce enough pearls to make any returns on initial investments.
The pearls are then harvested, cleaned, sorted, sent to market for either wholesaling or directly to manufacturers, trading hands hundreds of times before ending up on a retail sales floor or around your neck! In other words, culturing pearls by no means denotes an inferior product, but are the product of many hundreds of years of trial and error as well the fruits of a global market place and the simple but extraordinary creatures that make them.