JOIN USGem of a pearl
In 1937, Louis Kornitzer, a prominent London gem merchant, published The Pearl Trader, a passionate treatise on the natural pearl set against the backdrop of a brave new world in pearling. Three decades earlier, Kokichi Mikimoto, the son of a noodle maker in Toba, Japan, had perfected a method to culture pearls, the process by which a bead or piece of mantle tissue is implanted inside the fleshy part of a mollusk, forcing the creature to secrete an iridescent substance called nacre that forms a pearl.
Until Mikimoto’s discovery made organic gems available to the masses, pearls were accessories to aristocratic living. They have played a role in the lives of some of history’s greatest jewellery aficionados, from Cleopatra — who, according to legend, dissolved a pearl in vinegar to win a bet against Marc Anthony — to the watchmaker Louis Cartier. And they found some of their greatest expressions in the palaces of Indian maharajahs, who festooned ropes of the silvery gems across tunics, ornamental belts, carpets and canopies.
In The Pearl Trader, Kornitzer decried a future in which cultured pearls, which he called ‘cuckoo pearls’, ruled the marketplace. “I cannot see how mankind would be the gainer if fine pearls were as plentiful as blackberries and as cheap,” he wrote. Today, Kornitzer’s words ring with prescience. “In Hong Kong, you literally see sacks of pearls and people sitting on top of them,” said Kenneth Scarratt, managing director of the Gemological Institute of America’s Southeast Asia division.
From 1999 to 2009, the combined production of South Sea cultured pearls — the large, white-to-golden gems of the silver-lipped Pinctada maxima oyster, native to Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines — and of black pearls from the black-lipped Pinctada margaritifera oyster, farmed in French Polynesia, increased to 25 metric tons from 8.7 metric tons, according to Russell Shor, a senior industry analyst at the Gemological Institute of America.
Dwarfing that figure, however, is the volume of freshwater pearls cultured in China, which totalled 1,200 metric tons in 2009, Shor said. Faced with the ubiquity of these so-called common pearls, which can sell for as little as $20 a strand, connoisseurs are turning their backs. As a result, demand for natural pearls is on the rise. “It was a small market until five years ago,” said Paul Fisher, a London dealer whose great-great-grandfather began trading in natural pearls in Vienna in 1850. “The big buyers became the Indians, and they want Basra pearls.” Prized for their incomparable luster, Basra, or ‘Oriental,’ pearls from the Gulf are almost exclusively sourced today from “old inventory and old families,” Fisher said.
Collectors are willing to pay hefty premiums for such rare gems. On October 20 at Christie’s New York, a Tiffany & Co. necklace featuring 69 graduated natural pearls sold for $434,500, more than seven times the $60,000 presale estimate. “It goes to show the appreciation buyers have for things that are no longer produced,” said Rahul Kadakia, Christie’s head of jewelry for the Americas of the sale in April 2007 of a suite of natural pearls owned by the Maharajah of Baroda that fetched $7.1 million.
Gem dealers in the Gulf hope the market’s new-found mania for natural pearls will usher in a commercial renaissance for their historical trading hub. “The growing economies and spending power of India, China and the Middle East will continue to greatly influence market demand,” said Khaled al-Sayegh, chairman of the Pearl Revival Committee, a six-year-old organisation based in Abu Dhabi and dedicated to making the Gulf “once again the centre of the pearl universe.”
Only a handful of contemporary designers insist on using natural pearls, but they are noteworthy. In Paris, Joel Arthur Rosenthal, known as JAR, is one. A pair of his natural pearl, ruby, diamond, silver and gold ear clips went on the block at a two-day Christie’s Paris sale recently, for an estimated €80,000, or $105,000.
Viren Bhagat, a jeweller based in Mumbai, who channels Mughal-era style in one-off designs sought by collectors, is another. “You see a strand of cultured pearls and they all look so perfect,” Mr Bhagat said. “Natural pearls have a much quieter luster, which is really appealing.”
As demand for rare pearls has risen, so, too has interest in conch and melo pearls, two natural yet little known varieties of non-nacreous pearl born to the sea conch and sea snail, respectively. Conch pearls range in colour from white to pink; the finest specimens possess a telltale ‘flame’ structure and are found off the coast of the Bahamas.
Melo pearls, on the other hand, are fished in the South China Sea and the Bay of Bengal and are at their most desirable when they display a rich papaya-orange colour. Mikimoto, the century-old Japanese company, is bringing out a collection of melo pearl jewellery in 2011 to complement its existing conch pearl jewels line. It plans to position both at the top of its range. “With the flood of Chinese freshwater pearls and the nature of the market, we’ve had to be more discerning with our selection,” said Meyer Hoffman, chief operating officer of Mikimoto America. “That’s how you stay above the fray: by constantly introducing the consumer to the rarest and greatest pearls.” Paspaley Group, a farming and industrial conglomerate with headquarters in Darwin, Australia, promotes its goods as the closest thing buyers will find to natural.
“Today, the only truly reliable source of genuine natural pearls are the pearling companies who still fish wild pearl oysters,” Peter Bracher, executive director of the group, said. “Australia has the last carefully regulated and protected wild South Sea oyster beds in the world.”
As the science of culturing comes closer to mimicking Nature, the effort to distinguish natural pearls from their cultured counterparts gathers urgency. This became evident this year, when gemological laboratories around the world alerted the jewellery trade to several instances in which nonbeaded cultured pearls had been clandestinely submitted for certification and unwittingly classified as natural.
Were Kornitzer still alive, this counterfeiting would surely have precipitated a dramatic gesture of abhorrence and repudiation.
“For the last time I should gather around me my precious natural beauties that no one would buy,” he wrote in The Pearl Trader. “From their midst I would select a few of the fairest and dissolve them in vinegar. With all the recklessness of Egypt’s queen, I would then swallow the no longer costly brew in one long delirious gulp, but not without first pouring a generous and despairing libation to Venus Margaretifera.”
“And then? Then the moment would have arrived for me to erase the word ‘pearl’ from all the books on my shelves and die.”