Creating a Piece of Freshwater Pearl Jewelry
There is a piece of breathtaking freshwater pearl jewelry that stopped you in your tracks earlier today outside the jewelry store. The strands seem to cascade down the display, each individual pearl a perfect little gem. Instinctively, you know that this small piece of freshwater pearl jewelry took time, effort, and loads of imagination to create. Well, it’s time to trust your instincts, since you are absolutely correct.
Growing the Pearls
That piece of freshwater pearl jewelry started as a few grains of sand in a freshwater mussel. Like a sea oyster, a freshwater mussel creates a pearl because some sort of irritation has gotten into its shell. Since it can’t actively spit it out, it builds a hard shell around the irritant, creating a pearl that is valued worldwide.
Of course, natural, or uncultured freshwater pearls are often not spherical in shape. That’s one way to tell if the piece of freshwater pearl jewelry is natural; the shape of the individual pearls will be varied. Some will be round, others oblong some will even be shaped like small disks.
Pieces of freshwater pearl jewelry that have pearls that are spherical in shape are most often cultured pearls. The still form in freshwater mussels, however, the irritant is introduced by humans, and are often in the form of a small, spherical bead. If the irritant is spherical in shape, the pearl will be as well.
Creation of the Jewelry
Once the freshwater pearl is created within the mussel, and grown to an acceptable size, it is carefully harvested. Being careful not to damage the pearl, it is placed with many other similar freshwater pearls to be bleached and dried in the next step in creating a piece of freshwater pearl jewelry. The pearls are gathered together, dried, polished, and treated either with diluted bleach or with ultraviolet light to give them that whiter than white coloring that is so popular.
Of course, not all the freshwater pearls will react to the bleaching and polishing process in the same way. Because of this, the next step in creating that piece of freshwater pearl jewelry is so important. With hundreds, perhaps even thousand of pearls in front of them, certain people have the daunting job of sorting them out into strands of similar color, intensity, and shape.
Once the pearls are sorted, they are then gathered together, and small holes are carefully drilled through each one as a precursor to being strung into a strand for a piece of jewelry. Often this portion of the creation is machine driven, but there are those out there that still do this painstaking portion of the creation process.
Finally, those freshwater pearls are strung together, placed in earring settings, or placed in waiting ring prongs to create a piece of freshwater pearl jewelry. So the next time you see a piece of pearl jewelry out of the corner of your eye, stop and think how it came into being.
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