Everything you wanted to know about pearls… and a bit more 2.

Beware!

I highly recommend pinning the image above to one of your Pinterest boards, as this will be a long read and you might want to return to it later.

We collected some very interesting information about natural and imitation pearls for you.

Read on, if you would like to know:
– how are cultivated pearls “created” on mussel-farms,
– who swallowed a pearl to win a wager,
– which European royalty wore pearls on his shoes,
– what do pearls symbolize,
– how to take care of pearls,
– why do we love glass pearls and what can you create using pearls?

We wrote this article with lots of love.
Enjoy reading!

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Trivia

Real pearls are gems but not stones. The others (diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires) form as minerals under the surface of the earth, but pearls have organic origins. They arise from water and not from the depths of the earth.
The process of creating a cultured pearl was first developed by a British biologist William Saville-Kent who passed the information to Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa from Japan. In 1916 the patent was granted and soon the experimentation and development of the working process began. Japan was the first country to cultivate whole freshwater pearls.

99% of pearls today are cultured pearls, only 1% natural.
The majority of freshwater pearls are grown in China.
Pearls require no special cutting or polishing to achieve their glamour.
A magnificent 200-grain pear-shaped pearl named La Peregrina was discovered in 1515 by a Spanish explorer, Balboa and brought back to Spain. The pearl ornamented the Spanish crown jewels for centuries. The shine of the pearl was greatly damaged, as the dog of the latter owner, Elizabeth Taylor swallowed it…

The Hanoverian pearls, decorating the Crown-jewels of England today, were gained by Elisabeth I. from Mary Stuart´s lands, whom she previously had beheaded. Once Queen Alexandra, daughter-in-law of Queen Victoria was wearing the Hanoverian pearls in a strand, it broke and the pearls rolled off on the street under the feet of her horses in the carriage. Luckily and unbelievably, all pearls were found!
“In 1916, one of the chief architects of the Art Deco movement, Louis Cartier, traded a two-strand oriental pearl necklace for a Neo-Renaissance mansion on Fifth Avenue, which remains New York’s House of Cartier to this day. Both the necklace and the mansion were valued at $1.2 million, a fair exchange at the time (Cartier, 1982).” (https://www.gia.edu/doc/Pearl-Fashion-Through-the-Agesv.pdf)

Pearl is also
- a city in Rankin County, Mississippi,
- a village in Illinois,
- an interpreted programming language,
- can be a female given name and a family name as well,
- a studio album by Janis Joplin from 1971.