•  History of Pearls

•  South Sea Pearls

•  Tahitian Pearls

•  Grading Pearls

•  Caring for your Pearls

Oceanic pearls have been treasured for thousands of years, for both their rarity and unique beauty and longevity.  The many myths and legends surrounding the pearl have emerged through a reverence to its beauty and perfection with the pearl having been considered as a gift from the gods.

Pearls are created in partnership with nature.  Occasionally a pearl may be produced naturally through an irritant, such as a shell fragment or parasite, finding its way inside the oyster.  Quite naturally the oyster will lay down nacre, which is the substance lining the shell, to form a hard pearl casing around the irritant.  In the early 1900s Kokichi Mikimoto developed a means to implant a round nucleus into the oyster as a means of prompting the oyster to produce a round pearl.  This marked the birth of cultured pearling.   Nowadays methods remain much the same, with a bead from the freshwater mussel shell used as an implant to form the nucleus of a cultured pearl.