POTTY about PEARLS
No longer just for grannies, they’re suddenly all the rage
COCO Chanel declared them the mainstay of any elegant woman’s wardrobe, but in recent years pearls have been consigned to granny’s jewellery box, considered too dowdy compared to gems with more sparkle.
Now they’re back in style in a big way. Everyone from Kate Middleton to Rita Ora is wearing them, while designers such as Gucci and Miu Miu are adding them to clothes and accessories — even sticking them to catwalk models’ faces. So, what’s the appeal of a pearl? Long before diamonds and rubies were mined, lustrous pearls found in oysters were prized. ‘They were the most valuable gem for centuries,’ says David Warren, of auction house Christie’s.
Legend says Queen Cleopatra dissolved a giant pearl in a glass of wine and drank it to show off her wealth to lover Mark Antony.
Historian Suetonius wrote that a Roman general financed a military campaign by selling just one of his mother’s pearl earrings.
And in 1917 a millionaire financier traded a five-story mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue for a twostrand necklace for his wife.
Unlike gems, which develop underground, pearls are created within living creatures in oceans and freshwater lakes.
A natural pearl starts to form when a foreign object, such as a shell sliver, lodges in an oyster’s soft body. To ease this irritant it secretes ‘nacre’. Layer upon layer then builds up, making a pearl.
It can take five years for a 3mm gem to result. Barely 5% of oysters yield pearls of fine gem quality. A processor has to sift through more than 10,000 to find enough for a 16in necklace.
Until the 1970s pearls were chic. Jackie Kennedy famously said: ‘Pearls are always appropriate.’ And wealthy men have used them to prove their love.
Napoleon gave second wife, Marie Louise, a single dropshaped pearl, La Regente, which last sold in 2005 for €1.8million.
Film star Richard Burton presented Elizabeth Taylor with one of the largest pear-shaped pearls ever found, La Peregrina which was once owned by Mary Queen of Scots. The necklace containing it was sold for nearly €8million in 2011.
At the turn of the century Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto invented a way of placing irritants into oysters to make ‘cultured’ pearls.
At first, purists were horrified, terming them ‘artificial pearls’ but that snobbery has now gone. Charlie Barron, gem expert at jewellers Gemporia, whose family owns a pearl farm in Australia, is convinced that cultured pearls are every bit as beautiful. ‘There’s no unnatural processing or enhancement,’ he says. ‘‘These are all wild oysters which live at the bottom of the sea bed until it’s time to harvest the pearl.’
Three main species of oyster produce cultivated pearls: the Pinctada fucata, which produces small, white, round ‘akoya’ pearls; Pinctada maxima, the larger, silver to golden South Sea pearl; and Pinctada margaritifera, large black Tahitian pearls.
Many inexpensive pearls don’t come from oysters, but mussels grown in freshwater lakes, largely in China. Each can produce up to 50 pearls — slashing costs.
To untrained eyes they are hard to tell apart from much pricier akoya pearls. Charlie Barron, says: ‘When you’re buying pearls, you need to be clear whether they’re freshwater or seawater pearls. The price will vary hugely.’