You have heard of “Rice Krispie” pearls, “Corn” pearls, “Potato” pearls, “Born Again” pearls and even “Fireball” pearls, all descriptive names for the many different shapes of Chinese Cultured Freshwater pearls. In fact, though, rather than different shapes, they actually represent the different phases of freshwater pearl culturing in China as they have evolved their pearl culturing techniques over the years since the early to mid 1970’s. I remember buying my first strand of crinkled little freshwater pearls when I was living in Los Angeles. They were drilled longwise, so the strand was light and thin, and looked best when layered with at least one other necklace. When I started my first job out of college I received an interesting necklace from my mother, Eve Alfillé, which mixed sections of silvery pearls with dyed silvery-black ones punctuated by a few sections of side-drilled creamy keshi pearls. In fact, I still have it & occasionally wear it layered with other interesting freshwater pearls. The early very thin “rice krispie” pearls entered the market and rather quickly multiplied until they were everywhere! You likely owned at least one such strand yourself. Later, as Chinese pearl farming evolved the pearls became a little bit fuller and as the years went by, eventually more rounded.
As many of you already know, pearl culturing began years and years ago with the use of lead Buddahs implanted in oysters which, if not rejected & jettisoned by the sea creature, would later become coated with nacre and then retrieved by divers. Nacre is the substance secreted by a mollusk to protect itself from foreign invaders or debris lodged inside their shell. Salt water culturing using a sphere of shell from American rivers and streams, carefully placed inside an oyster together with a piece of donor tissue from an oyster of the same species, was developed and perfected in the mid 20th century by a few pearling pioneers, including Mikimoto of Japan.
In the case of freshwater pearl culturing, a piece of mantle tissue from another donor mussel of the same species was intentionally placed inside the mussel to precipitate the growth of a pearl. This allowed freshwater pearls a special distinction: they were made up of 100% nacre, the mantle tissue would dissolve and in its place a pearl would begin to form. The pearl farmers and technicians usually inserted multiple pieces of tissue into various places in the mussels so they could grow many pearls inside one shell.In the quest to create round pearls from mussels in China’s lakes & rivers, to compete with the Japanese saltwater Akoya oyster pearls (the kind a young lady received as her first strand of pearls in graduated sizes) the Chinese kept trying new techniques. Finally they were able to achieve more rounded pearl shapes, but these were only round in one dimension– the bottom of the pearls remained fairly flat. These became known as “Corn” pearls, at first very tiny, later grown to sizes as big as 9-10 millimeters as we entered the new millenium. And, as they worked to grow round freshwater pearls, they also created a shape that was more like a potato, elongated and rounded but with a flat bottom where the pearl grew against the mussel’s shell.
Time went on and finally the growers tried “seeding” their pearls with a pearl from an earlier harvest. This still allowed the pearl to be 100% nacre. And the Chinese freshwater pearls became larger. Much, much larger! The Chinese weren’t talking, but world pearl experts became suspicious & started examining the pearls with radiology and even dissection to try and learn how this was happening. The problem was one had to destroy some of these pricy and still rare large cultured freshwater pearls to determine how they were formed. Surprisingly, they found that the concentric rings of nacre (similar to the growth rings in trees) would sometimes completely change in color partway through the pearl. The exterior of the pearl might be white, but perhaps halfway through its development it appeared pink! This was very surprising – these pearls were formed by taking a previously harvested pearl and reimplanting it into a different mussel to grow a larger pearl! That is why they became known in the jewelry industry as “Born Again Pearls”. Also, it was suspected that some of the freshwater pearls which were reimplanted were inferior in appearance and may have been polished into a round shape prior to being reinserted, to be born again as larger & hopefully rounder pearls.
Another freshwater pearl phenomenon which created lots of excitement among jewelry designers, were wild, plump-bellied pearls with trailing “meteoric tail” shapes dubbed “fireball” pearls. These were bead-nucleated freshwater baroque pearls that looked like baroque pearls from the South Seas. These appeared on the pearl scene in 2006 and seem to have flamed out as the growers have learned to produce the more saleable round & off-round freshwater pearls, instead of the more unpredictable & interesting shapes designers covet. I have a pale pink strand that never fails to get noticed. Industry experts like our own Pearl Society founder, Eve Alfillé, believe that fireball pearls occurred because of the need for speed. Growers were rushing to get these large pearls onto the market. Instead of painstakingly inserting each nucleus into the exact right position, they were dropping the nuclei into the outer edges of the mussels’ mantle tissue where the pearls were more likely to form fireball shapes, going for speed and quantity.
Today you can find enormous cultured Chinese freshwater pearls in round to off round shapes in large sizes of 14- 15 millimeters, of fine luster & color. And now Chinese pearl growers have evolved the beautiful and exciting, enormous soufflé pearls.
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Posted by: Freshwater Pearls | April 04, 2011 at 05:27 AM