HOW PEARLS ARE BROUGHT TO MARKET

Saltwater cultured pearls can never be a mass-produced, factory-like product. The whims of unpredictable Mother Nature do not allow it. Millions of oysters are nucleated every year, but only a small proportion live to produce fine-quality cultured pearls. Many oysters don't survive the nucleating process, others are weak and fall prey to disease. Heavy rains may flood the bays with fresh water, reducing their salinity, and killing the oysters. Sometimes, certain species of phytoplankton undergo explosive growth, creating the dreaded "red tide," which exhausts the oxygen in the water, and suffocates the oysters. Then there are typhoons, the attacks of predators and parasites, lack of sufficient nutrients in the water. On average, only 50 percent of nucleated oysters survive to bear pearls, and of them, only 20 percent bear pearls that are marketable. The rest are simply too imperfect, too flawed to be called jewels.

And so, a perfect pearl is truly a rare event, blessed by Nature. Less than 5 percent of nucleated oysters yield pearls of such perfect shape, lustre and color as to be considered fine gem quality. These are the precious treasures of pearl cultivation, the rare prizes of any jewelry collection.

After harvesting, gem quality pearls must be sorted. Because no two pearls are ever exactly alike, sorting pearls is an extremely difficult and time-consuming effort performed by experts. Each pearl must be sorted by size, shape, color and lustre, so it is handled hundreds of times. After sorting, the pearls are drilled with great care and precision. An inexperienced operator can split or ruin pearls with careless handling. A hole drilled even slightly off-center can ruin a necklace or other piece of jewelry that depends upon the symmetry of its assembly of pearls.

Finally, it's time for matching and stringing. This can be even more difficult than sorting, because now experts must compare pearls that are similar in size, shape, lustre and color -- looking for nearly exact matches. The art of assembling pearls into a necklace, a pair of earrings or other jewelry calls for refined skills in matching. Only highly-trained experts with years of experience can perform this task.

To find 47 pearls for a perfectly matched 16-inch necklace, a pearl processor must cull through more than 10,000 pearls.