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Pearl: Nature’s Perfect Gem

Pearls are not the tears of mermaids, sharks, or princesses denied their lovers. They don’t form in dragons’ brains, or from lightning strikes on waves, or Venus shaking seafoam from her hair. They are not the lovechildren of oysters and dewdrops or fathered by moonbeams. For millennia, though, people speculated they might be. The myth that a pearl grows when a grain of sand gets stuck in an oyster’s soft body persists to this day. But oysters are filter feeders, siphoning plankton-rich water through their gills and are adept at ejecting sand. If grains of sand or the tears of every bullied princess made pearls, they’d be as plentiful as pebbles at the tideline. Far from being abundant, though, natural pearls are found in a scant fraction of oysters and other pearl-bearing molluscs. The chances of finding a large, unblemished, lustrous globe are a lottery-like one in several million.

Reaktion Books, Autumn/Winter 2022