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Natural pearls
There is no real commercial market for natural pearls. If you have a customer looking for natural not cultured pearls contact your customer reprsentive. The difference between cultured and natural pearls is that natural pearls begin with no intervention from man. Natural pearls are formed when a foreign object enters the shell of a mollusk and irritates the soft mantle tissue within. This irritant can be anything from a minute snail, worm, fish or crab to a particle of shell clay or mud. This object becomes trapped in a depression in the mantle tissue. This depression deepens until a pouch or sac is formed. The sac separates from the rest of the tissue and nacre-secreting cells within the sac secrets nacre over the irritant. This nacre builds up layer by layer. All of this occurs without the intervention of man what-so-ever. Most of these natural pearls are baroque - irregular in shape, either round or symmetrical. The longer the pearl remains in the mollusk, the more layers of nacre coat it. The pearl grows and so does its chance of becoming baroque. X-ray technology is the best way to determine a
natural pearl
Natural pearls today tend to be found
primarily in older jewelry from estate sales, auctions, and so forth -- in
other words, existing pearls rather than new ones. However, some natural pearl
beds are being increasingly harvested
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