By Hayden Branston
 Freshwater pearls are a kind of stone that comes from freshwater mussels. They are produced in Japan, China, and the United States. They are often used in jewellery and are also crushed to make cosmetic paints. Pearl is valued as a gemstone and is cultivated or harvested for jewellry. The unique lustre of pearls depends upon the reflection and refraction of light from the translucent layers. The iridescence (that is, where the hue changes according to the angle from which the surface is viewed) that some pearls display is caused by the overlapping of successive layers, which breaks up light falling on the surface. They come in various pastel shades of pink, peach, lavender, white, black, plum, and tangerine, depending on the type of mussel.
A single mussel can produce up to 50 pearls. Natural pearls are seldom perfectly round or even nearly round, more often than not they are of irregular, elongated shapes. Although white is the most common colour of freshwater pearls, the most desirable (and therefore the most expensive) are the pastel pinks, roses, lavenders, and purples. The different colours are a function |
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By Victor Epand
 This article is about real pearls, both natural and cultured. First, the term 'pearl' should be applied only to natural pearls, formed in a mollusk when some event in nature induces the oyster or mussel to form a pearl. These pearls are quite rare and are the pearls of antiquity before pearl farmers learned to culture pearls. Freshwater pearls fished from the rivers in the USA are natural pearls, but now-a-days, most freshwater pearls are also cultured in freshwater pearl farms.
In any event, naturally forming or cultured, such pearls are formed in the oyster or mussel and are not fakes. The real difference in the totally natural pearl and the cultured pearls is what makes the pearl start to grow and the thickness of the nacre. Nacre is the pearly layers that make a pearl so lovely. The natural pearl will have very thick nacre, generally forming in concentric rings around some starting source or irritation to the mollusk. A large natural pearl is very, very rare. Cultured pearls generally use a 'core' of mother-of-pearl, the shell of the mollusk.
The bead core |
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