A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

Pearls are made by marine oysters and freshwater mussels as a natural defence against an irritant such as a parasite entering their shell or damage to their fragile body. The oyster or mussel slowly ...

Its best freshwater pearls fueled a ready market overseas ... membrane (the lip of mantle tissue) with a nucleus of shell or metal into an oyster's body or mantle causes the tissue to form ...

About 200 years ago pearl mussels were harvested for, as the name suggests, pearls. However, the name can mislead - only about one per cent of them contain this hidden 'treasure' (and most of ...

The largest Scottish freshwater pearl found in living memory has been ... like a grain of sand, gets inside the shell. To protect itself, the oyster will coat the unwelcome visitor with layers ...

These days however, due to depleted stocks, it isn’t hard to shell out over £50 on a dozen ... Julius Caesar's desire to get his hands on our freshwater pearls is thought to have been his ...

Tap to read more. Mollusks like oysters and mussels, which live in both saltwater and freshwater, are the primary sources of pearls, forming them as a defense mechanism.

To enhance the freshwater pearls created in the Wabash River, they were shipped to Japan. “If you look at the side of a fresh mussel shell, it is real bright mother of pearl coloration.

Oysters and clams are two very popular edible mollusks or bivalves. Although they have many similarities between them, there ...

Pearls are the result of a mollusc's reaction to irritants such as parasites that enter its shell. Although model pearls are perfectly round and smooth, in reality they come in a huge number of shapes ...

The Abernethy Pearl - the largest Scottish freshwater pearl found in living memory - was discovered in 1967 and was named ...

What is it? Well, many of the manicures feature this ethereal, pearly, opalescent finish, a bit like the mother-of-pearl-insides of a mollusc shell. So there, I’m calling it: shell nails are ...