::PEARL::

HEALING PROPERTIES:
Pearl is the mother stone. Fosters motherly love and is a protective stone. Inspires purity, innocence, serenity, tranquility, focus and helps us get in touch with the simple honest things of life. Pearls are said to redress mental disturbance, endow maternal bliss, grant success in education, and also give access to property and vehicles. Pearls ensure good health and longevity and are said to attract fame and wealth. Helps tackle the evil eye and may abridge differences between quarrelling spouses. The stone redresses gastric disorders, asthma, cough, eye trouble, breathing trouble as also lung disorders.

PHYSICAL CHEMICAL PROPERTIES:
The color of pearls varies with the mollusk and its environment. It ranges from black to white, with the rose of Indian pearls esteemed most. Other colors are cream, gray, blue, yellow, lavender, green, and mauve. All occur in delicate shades. Cultured pearls are being produced in virtually every color of the rainbow.The chief component of the nacre that constitutes the pearl is aragonite CaCO. Pearls are formed by a mollusk consisting of the same material (called nacre, or mother-of-pearl) as the mollusk's shell. It is a highly valued gemstone. The shell-secreting cells of the mollusk are located in the mantleof its body. When a foreign particle penetrates the mantle, the cells attach to the particle and build up more or less concentric layers of pearl around it. Irregularly shaped pearls called baroque pearls are those that have grown in muscular tissue. Pearls that grow adjacent to the shell are often flat on one side and are called blister pearls. Pearls are characterized by their translucence and lustre and by a delicate play of surface color called orient. The more perfect its shape (spherical or droplike) and the deeper its lustre, the greater its value. Only those pearls produced by mollusks whose shells are lined with mother-of-pearl (e.g., certain species of both saltwater oysters and freshwater clams) are really fine pearls. Pearls from other mollusks are reddish or whitish, porcellaneous, or lacking in pearly lustre. The surface of a pearl is rough to the touch. Pearls come in a wide range of sizes. Those weighing less than 1/4 grain (1 pearl grain = 50 milligrams = 1/4 carat) are called seed pearls. The largest naturally occurring pearls are the baroque pearls; one such pearl is known to have weighed 1,860 grains.
Cultured pearl is natural but cultivated pearl produced by a mollusk after the intentional introduction of a foreign object inside the creature's shell.

Pearl

Chemical Formula

CaCO₃

Hardness

3.00

Specific Gravity

2.70

Refractive Index

1.53 - 1.68

ORIGIN HISTORY:
The discovery that pearls could be cultivated in freshwater mussels is said to have been made in 13th-century China, and the Chinese have been adept for hundreds of years at cultivating pearls by opening the mussel's shell and inserting into it small pellets of mud or tiny bosses of wood, bone, or metal and returning the mussel to its bed for about three years to await the maturation of a pearl formation. Cultured pearls of China have been almost exclusively blister pearls.
The production of whole cultured pearls was perfected by the Japanese. The research that led to the establishment of the industry was started in the 1890s by Mikimoto Kokichi, who, after long experimentation, concluded that a very small mother-of-pearl bead introduced into the mollusk's tissue was the most successful stimulant to pearl production. Cultured pearls closely approximate natural pearls.