The Pearl Story

of all the gems and jewels in the world there's only one that's perfect at the moment it's found no cutting or polishing needed the jewelry designer will have a great time with that one a round lustrous pearl this top-quality specimen should sell for about five thousand dollars a choker of pearls like this costs as much as a house [Music] for centuries these shimmering beauties were the rarest most precious of all jewels prized more than sapphires rubies emeralds even diamonds join us as we explore the mystery of pearls where they come from how they grow and the people who have given their money even their lives for the perfect pearl [Music] about 40 miles off the southwest coast of Australia lie the of braless Islands here in these remarkably unpolluted waters the rare black lift ping cada maxima thrives source of the much-coveted black pearl on this remote island husband and wife team Marie Davidson and piya Bocchetti are selectively breeding these oysters to produce perfect black pearls twice a year they harvest part of their crop pearls that have been growing for two years some of the industry's best technicians kazooie GT Tucker and Misaki flying to work for four weeks it's exacting meticulous work but each manages to harvest as many as 1000 pearls a day about half the pearls are so good that the oyster is receded despite the long hours and spending weeks away from home kazooie likes the work and then I like like coral and amber pearls are organic gems gems created by living things rather than geological processes these soft shimmering jewels are produced by a marine mollusk usually an oyster or a mussel reacting to an irritant Jonah Bentley explains the process to Taurus at willie creek pearl farm and broom Australia this is what the inside of the annoy stirrer looks like you can only see half of our hive actually cut this half off we're gonna put something a little bit bigger than a grain of sand in the oysters go ahead and that's how we're going to make a pearl actually the nucleus is much larger than a grain of sand it's 8 to 12 millimeters more the size of a pebble consider a pebble in your shoe it's painful so you shake it out an oyster on the other hand cannot as easily get rid of something that enters its shell but what the oyster can do is neutralize the irritation by creating a protective coating around it called maker underneath the sensory tissue this here is called the mantle tissue now the mantle to G is what secretes nacre which is this gooey substance so it looks like egg whites now that is naica and a CRE and if this was to crystallize on my hand my fingers would be a pearl that is what makes pearl the maker maker is made up of calcium carbonate and con khylin which is a fibrous protein all these miniature little crystals are laid out layer by layer with that glue natural flu and it just keeps coding and coding coding and eventually given enough time that pearl starts growing and get to a pretty sizable shape and form and despite what most people think a pearl does not grow around a grain of sand the grain of sand and myth is very romantic but unfortunately the maker does not adhere to an inorganic substance so therefore basically sand small pebbles rocks cannot make pearls instead most pearls form around living tissues such as a snail or worm in just a few months the hardened layers of nacre create a small pearl which can continue growing for as many as 15 to 20 years only a few Mallis produce beautiful pearls most Mallis such as the oysters and mussels we eat do not produce nacre so they cannot create true lasting pearls like fingerprints no two pearls are exactly alike but as with all gems certain qualities are prized more than others a pearls value depends on its size shape color complexion and luster when you do pick up a pill if it has many scratches marks dimples dents it's got a bad complexion you want one nice and smooth and round like this one here okay all the Strand that I'm wearing it's got a gray complexion it's extremely rare for a pearl to have a perfect complexion the luster is probably the most important thing into a pearl because pearls needs to shine is to reflect the light and that's obviously done if the build of the nacre he's even across the pearl the more clear and defined that you can see all your features inside that pearl the higher the luster it's the many layers and layers of nacre that have evenly been put around it so they reflect all the way but go all the way in bounce all the way back out in the shop the picture you get these qualities are also a matter of personal taste of course depending on the kind of oyster the color can range from pastel to black and pearls come in many unusual shapes known as baroque any shape can make a beautiful piece of jewelry which is a good thing because over the centuries natural round pearls have been hard to come by pearls in nature typically only about one percent of them are actually perfectly round in fact natural pearls of any shape are hard to find because most oysters don't contain pearls we'd have to kill at least 15,000 oysters to get one natural sila bull pearl and it's that rarity which throughout history has made pearls so coveted and so valuable for millions of years millions of oysters and mussels crowded the waters of the world we don't know who first discovered pearls but it probably occurred around the same time man discovered oysters its food since then pearls have been the stuff of legend when you really trace the lore of a lot of gemstones it actually translates back to a lot of ancient cultures in Greek mythology pearls were tears of joy shed by Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty the pearl goddess of ancient Egypt was Isis healer and giver of life the earliest evidence of pearl jewelry was found in the sarcophagus of a Persian princess who died in 520 BC a few centuries later rich Roman women used pearls much more lavishly they upholstered couches with them and sewed so many of them into their hems that they literally walked on pearls laws were eventually passed against such vulgar displays but the Roman lust for pearls continued in fact Julius Caesar invaded England partly for the pearl supplies according to plenty the Roman historian Cleopatra used two pearls to prove her wealth and power to the Roman general Mark Antony the two pearls were worth 117 thousand pounds of silver at today's prices that would be 20 million dollars she took one of her pearl earrings off and she dissolved into a cup of vinegar and she drank it down when she reached for the second pearl Mark Antony stopped her she had proven her point her riches demanded Roman respect but what a pearl really dissolve in vinegar in fact it would if it were crushed the vinegars 5 to 6% acidity would dissolve the pearls calcium carbonate and could you drink the vinegar mixed with pearl again yes the calcium carbonate would act as an antacid to balance the vinegar for the next 1,500 years Pearl's remained a high-priced luxury that only the rich which usually meant the royal could afford when Spanish conquerors made their way to the New World in the early 1500s they found that the Incas and Aztecs had vast supplies of pearls which they prized for both their beauty and their alleged magical powers they assigned gemstones according to the celestial heavens and pearl for example was very symbolic to the moon it was lustrous it was full it was bright - the Spanish conquerors though pearls represented something else cash the value of the pearls exported to Spain exceeded that of all other exports combined including emeralds gold and silver the huge supply was sold to Royals all over Europe including England's Queen Elizabeth who love pearls more than any other gem Queen Elizabeth the first and Queen Henrietta Maria they adorn themselves with loads of pearls one of the most famous pearls found in the Americas is La pedigree 'no or the wanderer the 50 carat pear-shaped white pearl the size of a pigeon's egg was found off the coast of Panama in the mid 1500s one of the largest pearls have ever seen was la peregrina and it came from the Americas and was eventually shipped over to Europe but it was owned by people like Philip a second Mary Tudor of England and also by somebody very famous here in the States Elizabeth Taylor Taylor's husband Richard Burton had Cartier jewelers fashioned the pearl into an exquisite necklace adorned with diamonds and rubies but even with the vast number of pearls in the Americas the supply couldn't last forever by the end of the 19th century pearls were getting scarce oysters had been over harvested both for pearls and for food and pollution had wiped out even more even for the very rich about the only hope of acquiring pearl jewelry was to inherit it meanwhile in Australia and Japan four men all working independently began trying to control the way Easter's and muscles create pearls their work would lead to a startling change in the pearl industry today's pearl market is almost entirely made up of cultured pearls that is pearls grown under controlled conditions only 1% of the market is natural pearls pearls that occurs strictly by chance how could a gem supply change so completely in less than a century it was the combination of scarcity and the work of a tireless entrepreneur by the name of Coco Chi mikimoto stimulating oysters to grow pearls wasn't a new idea the Chinese have been trying to culture pearls since the 1300s they didn't produce round pearls when they waveform shape they were kind of semi spherical and not for a uniform in shape by about two centuries later they're actually using little Buddhas and different images that they carve and they put inside there and then those we get coated with some type of maker and they saw them as Lucky Charms and things but in the late 1800s several inventors were independently motivated by the dwindling natural pearl supply Australian William Saville Kent discovered that if he took a piece of mantle which is an outgrowth from the inner oyster shell from one hoister and then implanted it in another a pearl would form in Japan government biologist tokichi Nishikawa and carpenter Tatsu Amos a learned of Saville Kent's technique in 1907 Nishikawa patented the grafting needle which is still used in pearl culturing also in Japan kikuchi mikimoto the son of a noodle maker was buying patents for similar techniques he already had an 1896 patent for producing hemispherical pearls called MA vase and a 1908 patent for culturing in mantle tissue but his breakthrough came in 1916 he invented the idea of using this Shelbie nucleus as the culture pearl seed shells were cut up and ground into spheres and those fears became labeed nucleus that was used in the cultivation process for the first time in history Mikimoto was able to create genuine pearls that were perfectly round and white but Mickey Moto's real genius was for business he bought the needle grafting patent from Nishikawa and me say launched large-scale pearl production and began convincing the world that cultured pearls were real gorgeous and affordable to pearls were available at that time natural pearls and imitation pearls and imitation pearls were considered fakes or they called them not real and the natural pearls were called real pearls and he had worked tirelessly globally trying to get his culture pearls to be considered under the name real rather than fake or imitation and it worked when cultured pearls first hit the market there was a wobble to see what they were going to do and when they became pretty enough and larger and more available that's when the natural pearl market plummeted World War two proved a turning point in the popularity of cultured pearls the GIS were in Japan at that time in right after world war ii and bringing back necklaces strands pendants earrings for their wives grandmothers daughters and it never stopped now that cultured pearls were affordable for almost everyone strands of pearls became a fashion staple pearls have been a traditional wedding gift for centuries but now instead of just a single pearl or two Brides received a whole strand cultured pearls had truly cornered the market a position that they hold to this day in fact the most widely known cultured pearls are the acquire pearls a saltwater pearl with the average size of a pea six to eight millimeters that is the classic look when you look at pictures and portraits of women through the last several decades that's what they most likely are wearing are these Akaya or japanese cultured pearls these pearls come from the equator originally cultivated by Mikimoto more than 2,000 independent growers cultivate these pearls in the waters around the southern half of Japan which is the largest Akaya habitat in the world less than half of the oysters survived nucleation and of the pearls produced less than 5% are of a very high quality yet far more aquellas are grown than any other saltwater pearl so most saltwater pearl necklaces are a koi is a koi is are exceptionally round white and lustrous a choker of very fine eight millimeter pearls will run as much as $11,000 although Japan controlled most of the Ocoee market for decades other countries now cultivate these saltwater oysters most notably China today some of the finest pearls in the world are cultured in the ocean off the west coast of Australia the giant South Sea pearl so big and lustrous that it's called the queen of pearls grows in several countries the finest silvery and creamy and white gold pearls are grown near Broome Australia creamy and golden pearls are also grown in the Philippines Indonesia and China farther south in the abroad us islands the large black lipped oyster is cultured for black pearls which range in color from grey to black and even to green these are commonly called Tahitian pearls French Polynesia Tahiti is best known for black pearls and is the number-one producer but they are also produced in the Cook Islands as well as the of Rallis the black pearl has only been farmed since the early 1960s when jean marie de Mond began using japanese culturing techniques on the black lift oyster an extremely large top-quality black pearl can fetch as much as $10,000 pia Bocchetti and marie davidson live here on an island six months a year enduring isolation and the overwhelming smell of dead oysters in the pursuit of great Tahitian pearls it's late September time to seed the oysters and if it's a good pearl again I'll restate it again and we've actually got through today for the thickness for tomorrow how's about 170 panel cultivating these oysters is not an easy job this far south the cool water temperatures make the oysters grow slowly but the slow growth also allows the pearls to develop an exceptionally deep luster the cultivating process begins with breeding large healthy oysters that grow quickly and produce good pearls but you've got to be really careful about what you're doing when you are selectively breeding because you don't want to breed brothers and sisters with each other I mean if you do breed that you know you're gonna get a lot of weak Easter's it's all the things that farmers have been doing on the land for about the last 50 years and we're just transferring that knowledge straight over into her voice to farming oysters are hermaphrodites both male and female and during the warm summer months they spit out sperm and eggs which joined with that of other oysters and fertilized in the open water the resulting little oysters are known as spats when we pick him up from a hatchery when they're two months old sometimes he's still there not visible to the eye and sometimes you can see them may be the size of a pinhead yeah they're very tiny a year later the tiny spats have grown to about two inches in diameter once we get it from the head tree that will they come on like a Christmas tree robe it looks like a Christmas tree decoration this rope it's black and we chop it up into about a meter length and on that middle length we'll have about a thousand shell and we put that inside a cage and we leave it there for it stays in there for about three months and then we start picking them off once every about ten mil we take them off then we put them in two forty five pocket panels for about six months and then we take them out and they go into a 30 mil mesh 15 pockets and they stay there right up until they're ready to be seated and that'll be like another year and a half maybe two years while they're growing the crew pulls them up out of the water for cleaning about once a month the workers scrub off barnacles and parasites so the oysters can feed easily and so an invasive parasite won't burrow in and distract the oyster from its pearl making mission they also clean out any predators this one here it's a fox shell it'll get in and it can kill like 50 oysters whatever's in a cage when the oysters are about a year-and-a-half old it's time to seed them regardless of the type of saltwater pearl whether a Koya South Sea or Tahitian the basic seeding process is the same when you state an oyster the actual nuclei goes into the gonad let's say that the gonad has egg in it when the technician tries to operate in these circumstances the egg will spill everywhere and you will end up with an irregular shape pearl they call it baroque or you'll get a pill that doesn't have much color their colors very dark not dull but silver they're more silvery colors but they're still very nice but we aim to get the more than more darker colors so if you can find the right time of year where the eggs not you know in huge amounts that's it that's a good time for seeding it's normally in the cooler months the process of seeding is a delicate one that requires both the shell bead nucleus and a bit of mantle tissue called Sai Bo acquiring the size o means the death of the donor oyster but the Seibel can culture dozens of oysters we have to cut the size of a site with a mantra tissue we yeah cut off the back one shell then we cut off with a piece of the mantle on small sponges then cut off Java maybe 3 3 mu square piece of meat then open up another shell then we cut some spot then we put in a sidewalk first oh yeah doesn't my sound technicians have of us the nucleus some technician there's a nuclear first and then cyber put them aside water put on together then about 2 weeks later Sybok just made their acaba de Bourgh nucleus then start from there if she'll spit spit out the nucleus then we can we go nothing so normally we we can get a 80 to 90 percent detentions which is good the oysters are returned to the water were they and hopefully the Pearl will grow for 2 years then they're pulled back up for harvesting this modern harvesting technique is a big improvement over the early days of natural pearl fishing those pearl divers attached a rope to one leg and dope down 30 to 40 feet in the Arabian Gulf the world's best pearl source for thousands of years in Australia in the early 1900's divers and cumbersome diving suits collected oysters both for their inner shell the mother-of-pearl lining used to make buttons and the occasional pearl it meant risking their lives day in and day out they obviously had sharks he had currents one of the biggest hazards was if they fell over in this equipment they fell onto their head they'd be dragged along the bottom of the ocean on their head which would force force all sorts of things to happen obviously death by drowning or the air hose would be severed when they changed over to kerosene driven pump in the 1940s all the divers are getting poisoned by the fumes and they used to signal to the surface to come up and they would close the valve which is like a buoyancy valve on the helmet and then the tender would it's just by pulling to the surface they pass out which meant the valve is shut the a suit will be filling full of air and they'd be getting larger and larger and start to ascend to the top at a great rate of knots which would obviously cause embolisms and onset of the bends possibly their eyes popping out or they had if you like all sorts of horrible things would happen to you so they were faced with many many hazards nowadays the oysters are simply pulled to the surface where they're cleaned and then pegged open I would normally pay about an hour before the shell get to the technician and because they go through these quite quickly will be really busy just because we have honey to pegas it's this picking one of the important parts as well because you can damage the muscle and then you won't know their life has been affected by it for about maybe four weeks because the oyster just get weaker and weaker when you do muscle damage once the oysters are pegged the technicians have to work quickly they sharpen say other words about if if they're out of the wind they can stay out for about two hours without any problem but if you leave them out in the wind and they dry out while they're sitting pegged like this and he'll make that least to dry out and probably die that's why we're inside when my pegging and we make it a nice sort of warm environment harvesting takes only a few seconds take it out kazumi checks each pull for quality it's got a few lugs because of those marks this oyster will not be receded kazooie will work with about 800 oysters a day and about 400 of them will be good enough to receive as is true for all farming the crop varies from year to year sudden changes in water temperature a lack of food storms or disease can kill the oysters one year we had a tsunami around here that affected our pearls because the water temperature went up and it was just a different flow of water coming through so temperature spikes and different water conditions like that it's gonna make the gonad really shrink and they don't affect the pilferer it might not even recover always up and down all it depends on the conditions of shells and farm conditions and our conditions too so always up and they're so very hard to keep a one-level sometimes good harvest sometime you know not very good about 50% of the pearls massage seeds become round pearls of 10 to 12 millimeters a few grow as large as 14 to 17 millimeters we can see that or result in not be as vera some nice pear coming up that's very nice to see anything make us happy [Music] 1,200 miles north near Broome Australia drives the silver lift pink Otto Maxima this huge mollusk produces exceptionally large white South Sea pearls the so called queen of pearls this ones are extremely rare out of the whole production for example of last year's harvest we only had 500 pearls approximately there were over 19 millimeters Lance O'Sullivan has been working for Kayla's pearls for 20 years managing a 200-thousand shelled farm the fine I was just that right square miles in area especially in the middle of the bite here where the water is warmer the rate of maker production is faster creating an exceptionally thick pearl coating over the nucleus because of the warmer temperatures the luster is also softer giving these pearls as satiny glow in Broome they employ two different farming techniques we got am a bottom farming technique where the shell is strung in panels on the bottom on fence lines this technique more closely replicates how oysters grow in the wild on the ocean floor but reaching them requires scuba gear the second method places oysters near the surface with 100 panels to align just through results and tests we've done we're getting better results from the shell on the surface the shell seemed to grow quicker they're bigger and the pearls come out a much bigger pearl and heavier pearl one buddy oh do about far there's a five long lonesome I died which is five thousand shell it's about probably three or four bites working out there so they probably get about 15 long ones done today cleaning these Maxima shells is more difficult and more critical than cleaning the black lift oyster because the shells are bigger and because the warm waters encourage disease now there's a few things that we do look for on the oysters one is called red ass disease okay now what happens with the red ass the red tinge actually starts at the base of the oyster okay and it eventually eats it eats away at it it's a little bit like osteoporosis it's encountered on the farm shell when we're doing harvesting your x-rays will remove it from the farming quota and kill it and hopefully we remove it from all of our stock from that in that way here as with the black lipped oyster if an oyster produces a smooth round lustrous pearl it will be receded as we have said show the technicians make a decision whether to really operate the shell and place another nuclei in it or they'll kill the shell because it um hasn't produced the good pearl or health isn't up to scratch and I'm so you know usually our harvest we my tree operate around 50% of our shell we take pearls out they really operate 50% of it the other 50% 40% will be killed so after we pull out that 8 pink to milk / okay what we'll do is grab an eight point two million through the same thing put it on the copper put it back inside the go now you can go straight onto the long line where it will spend for the next two years out in the ocean getting force-fed by the tide after two years inside the oyster the farmer hopes to harvest a pearl that will be about ten point five millimeters in size with luck it will also be round and lustrous he's the anagen I'm one reoperation and sometimes we got to sous second preparation but we found out through experience that basically the animals bit talked about then and he won't produce a good pearl you know and they've had their life and they're farming so pretty well we with a very small amount of second real prices the larger the nucleus however the greater the chance that the oyster will die during the implantation process or reject the nucleus altogether and not produce a pearl for this reason large pearls are much rarer than small ones and the larger the pearl the more expensive an oyster may be reseeded two to five times depending on the quality of the pearl that produces culturing also produces some beautiful pearls called Keshi these pearls form as a byproduct of the culturing process usually when the oyster expels the nucleus with the mantle tissues still in place nacre is secreted but without a round nucleus the nacre forms in virtually any shape just as it would for natural pearls it's just fascinating to see what different one you're gonna get out of it each time rather than round culture ones because Kesha's are all nacre with no bead nucleus they have a high luster another unusual shape is the mob a sometimes called a blister pearl it's produced by setting a hollow half round form on the inside of the shell and allowing the mollusk to cover it with nacre eventually they'll cut the little dome off and they'll fill that with something and then put a mother pearl backing on it and those are used quite often in earrings so you see quite a lot of signs with mob a pearl earrings sometimes used in rings and pendants but a lot of them are in earrings when the oyster stops producing good pearls it's sold off for parts once the shell are killed we remove their guts and the meat and that sound processed the meat is sold for a good price the guts is used its guts is put through a machine to make sure we get any product that's left in their caches and small pieces and then that can be all used as a byproduct for fish food or even some of your hatcheries we in the hatchery business we use some of that for food in our history a top quality seventeen millimeter South Sea pearl can cost around thirteen thousand dollars making them not only the largest but the most expensive cultured pearls in the world but smaller more affordable aquellas are far more common and in fact once you leave saltwater you find even less expensive pearls that are produced by the millions of tons each year in eastern China people have been farming freshwater pearl's for decades they've gotten to the point now over years of developing techniques that got down pat and they see some very nice pieces out there here the pearls may grow for two to five years and instead of one large pearl these mussels can produce more than 30 smaller pearls the difference is in the culturing technique in this technique rather than implanting one bead in a small bit of mantle tissue as for the South Sea pearls technicians take tiny pieces of mantle tissue only and implant them throughout the host muscle what they use is the mantle tissue which is basically a little bit of the meat a little bit of the fleshy part that they actually cut a small section of that and introduce that into the mollusk the freshwater mollusk and it's found that that is enough to start the nucleating process the growth of a pearl will actually occur and basically dissolve that little mantle tissue so what you have is a pearl that is nacre through and through it's not a thin coating of nacre pearl or surrounding a bead but what you have is a full pearl that's all nacre if you were to cut that in half there's no bead nucleus it's all pearl the result is round freshwater pearls in a rainbow of colors in sizes of 11 millimeters and more while strands of uniform white pearls are still largely unavailable necklaces combining various shades are becoming very popular today most of the freshwater pearl market belongs to China in 2005 China produced 800 tonnes of pearls which was 95 percent of all freshwater pearl production in 2006 the harvest rose to 1,200 tonnes and with 7,000 pearl farms employing 200,000 people it looks as though the numbers will continue to rise there's more to China's pearl industry than just farming the pearls these pearls pass through many skilled hands and processes before they hit the market first workers sort the pearls according to size shape and color many grow naturally in pastel shades such as lavender pink peach and silver next they drill holes into the pearls this process requires such precision that they practice on beans for a month before they tackle actual pearls the pearls are then soaked in a solution to enhance their luster and some are dyed to create bright fashionable colors many gemstones are treated and pearls are no exception what they try and do is enhance the beauty of the pearl so they do diam they add any number of colors you see it frequently on the freshwater pearls there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's disclosed and they can create some beautiful colors me and get blues greens I've seen some incredible colleagues but you look at it and you know it's not natural but mother nature's not gonna make a bright blue pearl so if you want to color coordinate your whole closet well in some case of the dyeing is nice to serve an alternative finally the pearls are matched in size to create a necklace it may take dozens of Mallis to produce similar sizes of pearls freshwater pearl's grow all over the world including here in the Kentucky lake in West Tennessee this one here is probably worth about 40 50 dollars just small but we produce a good quality pearl and this pearl right here is about as good as perfect disapper as you'll ever find [Music] the freshwater pearl's cultured in tennessee start with a bead core much as the saltwater pearls do in fact the artificial bead at their core is probably the very same kind of mussel shell when you buy a strand of pearls rest assured that that implant that see that nucleoli has come right here from the waters of the tennessee river back in the early 1900s when mikimoto was developing his method of culturing pearls he experimented with bead cores made of everything from wood to glass he found that nacre adhered best to American muscle shell for the past 90 years these shells have been at the heart of almost all cultured pearls so this is a shell a Tennessee River shell called the washboard shell because it looks like your grandmother's washboard from the early 1900's that's where it gets its name these shells are harvested yearly and what they do after they are exported to Japan they are cut into these slices like this now this one is a large slice this one comes from a shell that is three times as large as this one and the slices were then cutting two dice and these dice are then ground into round beads and these are the round beads that create cultured pearls unlike other shells these mussel shells grind to a very smooth dense surface which encourages the nacre to form into a very smooth pearl whether from freshwater or saltwater pearls come in an astonishing range of sizes shapes and colors if the past century is any indication the number of choices will only continue to grow whether round oval baroque Keshi or mob a the same principles are used to create a piece of pearl jewelry a pearl we always have what we call a clean face so you will actually show on one side better to the other side and notice that's what we use to set if there is a specific spot where we want to hide that's in general what the jeweler's drill a hole the classic pearl necklace a strand of round pearls is traditionally strung on soft fine Griffin silk with one knot between each pearl the knots keep the pearls from rubbing together and damaging the nacre and if the Strand breaks only one pearl is lost it's a good idea to restring pearls when the threat is dark and dirty or if the pearls move loosely between the knots because pearls are created by living tissue they're easily damaged by chemicals even the lemon juice or vinegar in your salad dressing can eat through the nacre just as Cleopatra's pearl dissolved in a glass of vinegar they are organic and when they're exposed to hairspray perfumes cosmetics that can actually break down they're nature's coatings because it is an organic substance and those are chemicals it's also a good idea to wash your pearls from time to time because a greasy coating will make them appear dull wash them in warm sudsy water then dampen a tea towel and roll them up in the towel so there's a layer of cloth between each layer of pearls this method keeps the string from stretching and can keep your pearls safe and lustrous so future generations can enjoy them as much as you do when the cloth is dry the pearls are ready to wear and speaking of the future what is the future for pearls can culturing go on forever or will pearls someday be as rare as they once were although China is producing freshwater pearls at an astonishing rate pollution threatens oysters and mussels all over the world in Tennessee for instance a pearl company recently lost an entire crop mussels dying everywhere and we didn't know what was wrong and then we realized that there was some sort of pesticide new pesticide that had been used at the farming areas and we had great amount of rain that same week and so that runoff went straight into the little Bay where our pearl farm was and destroyed over a half of half a million shells and we were never able to to start that farm up again it was a great loss even Australia's pristine waters are threatened they stunt into a biggest study on it now because it's starting to get lower and lower quality of water and compared to 15 years ago it was really good quality now there's more and more people around so the pollution gets bigger and bigger for now though Australia is still a growth market in fact while Pia Bocchetti was looking for wild black lipped oyster to breed with her hatchery oysters she found a surprising new oyster it turned out to be the Akua japan's prized oyster was growing thousands of miles south of japan we're currently producing pearls from these it's a new totally new industry I'm the only one in Western Australia doing it and it looks very promising because the pearls were getting a quite big 11 we get between nine and eleven mil which is quite large for a Koya Pearl's say in about three years we should be producing probably around 300,000 of these a year in centuries past that would have been a king's ransom with careful farming and inventive production methods as well as increased efforts to mitigate the environmental threat pearl farmers like Pia Bocchetti hope to be able to make it possible and affordable for everyone to own one of man's first precious gems [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: jtv, jewelry television, pearls, pearl, pearl jewelry

Id: j5yi3q4SVgI

Length: 46min 9sec (2769 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020