99 Fun Facts About Pearls

Inside which part of a mollusc does a pearl form?

The mantle is the soft tissue that also secretes the shell, and it coats any intruder in layer after layer of nacre.

Pearls are made mainly of which mineral?

Calcium carbonate is the mineral of chalk and limestone, but a mollusc lays it down as hard crystal in concentric layers, the same way it builds its shell.

Pearl is a birthstone for which month?

June got pearl when American jewellers agreed an official birthstone list in 1912; moonstone shares the month, and alexandrite was added in 1952.

What gives nacre, also called mother-of-pearl, its rainbow shimmer?

Sheets as thin as light waves: nacre's stacked crystal plates are about as thick as a wavelength of visible light, so reflections interfere and the colours shift as you tilt it.

Pearls rarely start with a grain of sand; which intruder is a more typical trigger?

A parasite is a classic trigger: the mollusc cannot expel the intruder, so it seals it off and coats it with layer upon layer of pearl.

Which common household liquid can dissolve a pearl?

Vinegar's acid reacts with the pearl's mineral and releases carbon dioxide, so the gem fizzes away; jewellers warn that any acid harms pearls.

Per Pliny the Elder, which queen dissolved a priceless pearl in a drink to win a dinner-party bet?

Cleopatra bet Mark Antony she could spend ten million sesterces on one dinner; the umpire, Plancus, stopped her before she could dissolve her second pearl earring.

What word describes pearls that are irregular rather than round?

Baroque described lumpy pearls in French before it named the ornate art style; the word is said to come from the Portuguese 'barroco', an irregular pearl.

Which examination technique is used to tell a natural pearl from a beaded cultured pearl?

X-ray images reveal the solid bead at the heart of a cultured pearl, where a natural pearl shows growth rings from the centre outwards.

In the jeweller's 'tooth test', how does a real pearl feel when rubbed gently against a tooth?

Slightly gritty: a real pearl's surface is built from microscopic overlapping crystal plates, while glass or plastic fakes feel completely smooth.

Glass imitation pearls are traditionally coated with 'essence d'Orient', a solution made from what?

Fish scales yield tiny crystals with a pearly sheen; a 17th-century Paris rosary-maker named Jaquin is credited with first turning them into this 'pearl essence'.

One theory traces the word 'pearl' to the Latin 'perna', which meant what?

Leg, or more exactly a leg of ham: 'perna' also named a shellfish with a ham-shaped shell, though dictionaries call the link to 'pearl' only a likely guess.

Which girl's name comes from the ancient Greek word for pearl?

Margaret comes through Latin from the Greek 'margarites', pearl, a word Greek probably borrowed from an Eastern language; devotion to Saint Margaret of Antioch spread the name in the Middle Ages.

Which Japanese entrepreneur is credited with creating the first cultured pearl, in 1893?

Kokichi Mikimoto grew his first half-round pearls in 1893 on an island off Toba, and in 1932 he publicly burned heaps of inferior pearls to show he sold only fine ones.

Which French composer wrote The Pearl Fishers (1863), set in ancient Ceylon?

Georges Bizet never saw it revived in his lifetime, yet its duet for two friends is now one of the most famous in the repertoire.

Which inventor met Japan's leading pearl farmer in 1927 and marvelled at his cultured pearls?

Thomas Edison called the cultured pearl something he had thought biologically impossible; his guest is said to have replied that he was only one small star among inventors.

Which jeweller is said to have bought its Fifth Avenue mansion in 1917 with a double strand of pearls?

Cartier, by the firm's famous account, traded a necklace of natural pearls valued at $1 million for the house; cultured pearls later sent such prices tumbling.

Akoya pearls, the classic choice for a white strand, are farmed mainly in which two countries?

Japan and China are the main akoya producers; the oyster is so small that pearls over 10 mm across are extremely rare.

Which cultured pearls, grown in the world's largest pearl oyster, are typically the biggest?

South Sea pearls grow in Pinctada maxima, whose gold-lipped and silver-lipped varieties give them their golden or silvery-white colours.

Tahitian pearls are popularly known as what colour of pearl?

Black is the trade name, but a truly black Tahitian pearl is extremely rare; most are charcoal grey, silver or dark green.

Why are Tahitian pearls far scarcer than freshwater pearls?

Each oyster grows a single pearl at a time, around one implanted bead, while one freshwater shell was once grafted to grow as many as 50.

Most freshwater cultured pearls sold in the 21st century come from which country?

China leads by a wide margin, while Japan, the first country to farm whole freshwater pearls, has seen its own industry all but disappear.

Keshi pearls share their name with the Japanese word for 'poppy'; what are they?

Small accidental pearls with no bead: keshi form when an oyster rejects its implanted bead yet keeps laying down pearl, so they are solid nacre all the way through.

Which island nation's 'Pearling Path' through old Muharraq is a UNESCO World Heritage Site?

Bahrain out-exported its neighbours in pearls until the trade collapsed in the 1930s, when Japan's cultured pearls arrived; oil then took over.

Pliny the Elder wrote that the most highly praised pearls came from which body of water?

The Persian Gulf's pearls were 'specially praised', Pliny wrote, though he named Ceylon as the richest fishery of all.

Spanish conquistadors found a vast pearl bed around Cubagua and Margarita, islands off which country?

Venezuela's Cubagua boomed so fast that its pearl town, Nueva Cádiz, was made a city in 1528; within years the oyster beds were stripped and it was abandoned.

Pearls were said to be one of the attractions that drew which Roman leader to Britain?

Julius Caesar later dedicated a breastplate of British pearls in his temple of Venus in Rome, though Pliny judged the island's pearls small and poorly coloured.

Who bought La Peregrina, the pearl once owned by Spanish kings, at Sotheby's in 1969?

Richard Burton paid $37,000 and gave it to Elizabeth Taylor for Valentine's Day; in 2011 it sold at auction for more than $11 million.

Where did Elizabeth Taylor find La Peregrina after it went missing in her Caesars Palace suite?

In a puppy's mouth: Taylor wrote that she noticed one of her dogs chewing on something, opened its jaws and took out the pearl, unscratched.

Which actress played the maid Griet in the 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring?

Scarlett Johansson moved from teen to adult roles with the part; the film adapts Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel, which imagines how the painting came to be made.

The Pearl of Lao Tzu, also called the Pearl of Allah, grew inside which animal?

A giant clam produced it off Palawan; the tale tying it to the sage Lao Tzu rests on the word of the American who brought it home in 1939.

A fisherman kept a 34 kg 'pearl' under his bed for ten years as what?

A good-luck charm: it surfaced in 2016 only when he moved house and handed it to a relative at the city tourism office, who asked gemologists to examine it.

Rare pink 'flame structure' pearls of the Caribbean come from which animal?

The queen conch sea snail forms pearls so rarely that nobody fishes for them: they turn up as a by-product of the conch-meat fishery.

Blue pearls are cultured in pāua, an abalone found only in the waters of which country?

New Zealand's pāua has a shell of vivid blues and greens; farmers fix a small implant inside it, and the abalone coats this to make a domed blue pearl.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, painted around 1665, is the work of which Dutch master?

Johannes Vermeer painted her as a tronie, a study of a character type and not a portrait, so the girl was never meant to be a recognisable person.

In 2014 a Dutch astrophysicist argued that the 'pearl' in Girl with a Pearl Earring looks more like what?

Polished tin was one of Vincent Icke's two guesses, after silver: the earring is too large for a pearl and reflects its surroundings like a mirror.

Which author wrote The Pearl, a novella about a poor diver named Kino in La Paz, Baja California?

John Steinbeck based it on a folk tale he heard in La Paz in 1940; in his version the great pearl brings Kino only grief, and he hurls it back into the sea.

Japan's traditional 'ama' divers, famous for gathering pearls and abalone, are mostly what?

Women have long worked as ama, diving without air tanks, and Japan's first pearl farmers depended on them to bring up oysters.

Broome, whose pearling industry began in the 1880s, is a town in which state or territory?

Western Australia's Broome began with Aboriginal people forced to dive for shell; later its boats were crewed mostly by Japanese, Malay and Chinese divers.

The South Sea pearl was declared the national gem of which country in 1996?

The Philippines made it a national symbol by proclamation of President Fidel Ramos, and the pearl now appears on the back of the country's 1,000-peso note.

The phrase 'pearly gates' comes from a vision of the heavenly city in which book of the Bible?

Revelation gives the New Jerusalem twelve gates, each a single pearl, beside a street of pure gold; popular culture added Saint Peter as gatekeeper.

Pearls from Mexico's rainbow-lipped oyster glow red under which kind of light?

Ultraviolet light makes these Gulf of California pearls fluoresce red, a reaction that helps gem labs tell naturally dark pearls from dyed ones.

What is the name of the protein 'glue' that binds the mineral plates in mother-of-pearl?

Conchiolin is the flexible binder between the crystal plates: it stops cracks from spreading, which makes nacre remarkably tough.

Scotland's river pearls, protected from fishing since 1998, grow not in oysters but in which shellfish?

Mussels: the freshwater pearl mussel of Highland rivers was fished so hard after a famous 1967 find that it won full legal protection in 1998.

Japan's first freshwater pearl farms grew up on which lake?

Lake Biwa's name became shorthand for freshwater pearls, yet the lake's own pearl industry has since all but vanished.

Which of these standard pearl necklace lengths hangs the lowest?

Opera strands run to about 30 inches; anything longer is called a 'rope', which wearers can double or wrap round the neck several times.

Which Japanese weight unit, also used to grade silk, do pearl dealers use for loose pearls and strands?

The momme equals 3.75 grams; it reached the West through the Japanese silk trade, which is why silk fabric is rated in momme too.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns against casting pearls before which animals?

Swine would only trample them, the verse warns; the image gave English a lasting phrase for wasting something precious on those who can't value it.

In which Scottish river did William Abernethy find a famous pearl, nicknamed 'Little Willie', in 1967?

The Tay yielded the Abernethy Pearl, and the publicity sent weekend treasure hunters into Scotland's rivers through the 1970s and 80s, stripping their beds.

At the end of The Pearl, what does Kino do with the gem that has ruined his family?

Kino throws it into the sea after seeing every disaster of the past days reflected in its surface. He had found it only days earlier and dreamed it would lift his family out of poverty.

In The Pearl, which creature's sting to Kino's infant son sets the whole tragedy in motion?

A scorpion stings the baby on the shoulder as Kino lunges to catch it in mid-air. The search for a way to pay a doctor is what sends Kino diving that same day.

Which item from Kino's wish list in The Pearl does he finally carry home, taken from a dead tracker?

A rifle is the wish Kino hardly dares to say aloud, and he ends the story carrying one. By then a tracker's bullet has cost him the son he hoped to raise up.

In The Pearl, why do the rival pearl dealers all bid so little for Kino's find?

They serve one hidden buyer, so the rival offices are a show and the bids are agreed before Kino walks in. The top offer is 1,500 pesos for a pearl he values at 50,000.

Why does the town doctor in The Pearl refuse to treat Kino's badly stung baby at first?

The family cannot pay, and the doctor will not treat a fisherman's child for a handful of small, worthless pearls. He hurries to their hut only once news of the great pearl reaches him.

The plot of The Pearl was borrowed from which kind of source, heard in La Paz in 1940?

A folk tale about a boy who found a great pearl gave the story its bones. The novella turned the boy into a husband and father and added the doctor and the priest.

In The Pearl, which dream for his baby son startles Juana when Kino says it aloud?

He will go to school and learn to read, write and make numbers, Kino declares, so that his parents will know things through him. Kino had never spoken so many words together in his life.

What sound in The Pearl draws the trackers' fatal gunshot toward the family's mountain hiding place?

The baby's cry reaches the trackers by their pool, and one of them takes it for an animal's whimper and fires. The bullet ends the very life the pearl was meant to save.

Fifteen years after The Pearl appeared as a book, its author received which honor for his life's work?

The Nobel Prize in Literature came to him in 1962 for realistic, imaginative writing marked by sympathetic humor. The Pearl, a slim classroom favorite, sits beside far longer books in that body of work.

Which label does the preface of The Pearl itself suggest for Kino's story?

A parable is how the book's own preface invites readers to take the story, each finding a personal meaning in it. It became one of its author's most widely taught books in American classrooms.

What is the name of Kino and Juana's infant son, whose injury opens The Pearl?

Coyotito is the couple's only child, and every plan Kino makes for the pearl's money centers on him. The pet name links him to the coyote, one of many animal echoes in the book.

How is Juan Tomás, who hides the hunted family in The Pearl, related to Kino?

His brother Juan Tomás warns Kino beforehand that the pearl dealers may cheat him. He and his wife later hide the fugitives in their own house for a day.

In The Pearl, what do unseen searchers do to Kino's home after ransacking it for the pearl?

The searchers set it on fire once their digging turns up nothing, and for a while the neighbors believe the family burned inside. That mistake buys Kino a day in hiding.

Which heirloom from Kino's grandfather is found with a hole smashed in its bottom in The Pearl?

The family canoe is the one thing of value Kino owns, the tool that keeps his household from starving. To him, wrecking a boat is a worse crime than taking a life.

The grasping doctor in The Pearl hears of Kino's find and at once daydreams of which European city?

Paris is where the doctor longs to be, and the great pearl looks to him like the fare. He sips chocolate in bed while Kino's family waits at his door.

Turned away by the doctor in The Pearl, Juana dresses her baby's wound with a poultice of what?

Seaweed makes Juana's poultice, a remedy the narrator treats as effective. It simply lacks the doctor's authority, which is why she still prays for a pearl to pay him.

Sent away by a servant in The Pearl, what does Kino strike so hard that his knuckles split?

The doctor's gate takes the blow of his bare fist. The same bloodied hand holds the great pearl a few hours later.

With the pearl's money, Kino's first wish in The Pearl is to give Juana which long-delayed ceremony?

A proper wedding comes first on Kino's list, and in the pearl's surface he pictures Juana in a new skirt and himself in a felt hat. The visions grow bolder with each wish he names.

On hearing of Kino's find in The Pearl, the local priest wonders whether it might pay for what?

Church repairs are the priest's first thought, and he tries to recall what services he has ever done that family. He soon calls at the hut to remind Kino to give thanks.

The first dealer Kino visits in The Pearl compares his huge pearl to which worthless find?

Fool's gold is the dealer's comparison: he calls the pearl too large to sell and of interest only as a curiosity. He then offers a thousand pesos for a gem worth many times that.

Which recurring device lets readers of The Pearl follow Kino's moods, from family calm to danger?

Songs in his head carry the story's feelings: a Song of the Family at breakfast, a Song of Evil when danger nears. His ancestors, the narrator says, turned their whole lives into song.

La Paz, the town where The Pearl unfolds, takes its name from the Spanish for which word?

Peace is what La Paz means, an irony critics relish: the town stays calm only until one fisherman finds a fortune. One early title for the story was The Pearl of La Paz.

Critics read the doctor, priest and pearl dealers of The Pearl as faces of which historical force?

Colonialism runs under the fable: the indigenous fishing families depend on wealthier settlers in town for medicine, religion and prices. Each of those powers tries to profit from Kino's find.

The Pearl is usually taught as a warning about which human failing?

Greed is the failing the story dwells on, and nearly everyone in La Paz catches it once news of the pearl spreads. Even gentle Kino grows suspicious, violent and unwilling to let go.

In The Pearl, which act of Kino's on the dark beach leaves his family no choice but to flee?

Killing an attacker in the dark, even to save his own life, makes Kino a wanted man. Juana finds the dropped pearl on the path and tells him they must be gone before daylight.

How does Kino react in The Pearl when he catches Juana creeping to the shore with the pearl?

He beats her, striking her face and kicking her side, then stalks off up the beach. It is the moment the gentle husband of the opening pages shows how far the pearl has changed him.

As danger nears her baby in The Pearl, Juana mutters an ancient charm and which Catholic prayer?

A Hail Mary follows the older magic, so Juana calls on both faiths at once. The pairing shows how the villagers blend ancestral belief with Catholic teaching.

What does Juana make for breakfast in the calm opening scene of The Pearl, before disaster strikes?

Corncakes from corn Juana grinds herself are the couple's breakfast, eaten in a silence that needs no words. It is the last ordinary morning they will have.

The first pearl dealer in The Pearl hides his shock, but his fingers fumble which small object?

A coin he rolls back and forth across his knuckles slips when he sees the pearl, the only honest reaction in the room. His face stays blank as he names a low price.

The narrator of The Pearl says the oyster bed Kino dives once paid for the wars of which ruler?

The King of Spain grew powerful on pearls from this very bed, the narrator says, so Kino dives where an empire once fed itself. The book never lets the reader forget who profits from these waters.

The Pearl grew out of a 1940 collecting voyage its author made with which marine biologist friend?

Ed Ricketts ran a small lab on Monterey's Cannery Row, selling shore specimens to universities. He was the model for Doc, the good-hearted biologist of his friend's Monterey novels.

The La Paz anecdote behind The Pearl was first recorded in which 1941 nonfiction book by its author?

Sea of Cortez mixed a travel diary with natural history and sold poorly, appearing just as America entered the war. Its narrative half was reissued on its own in 1951.

Which leading director of Mexico's golden-age cinema made La Perla, the 1947 film of The Pearl?

Emilio Fernández directed it and wrote the screenplay with the book's author and Jack Wagner. The picture won the Ariel for Best Picture, Mexico's top film award.

Which Mexican star, later Kerim Bey in From Russia with Love, played Kino on screen in 1947?

Pedro Armendáriz played Kino opposite María Elena Marqués as Juana. Gravely ill while shooting his Bond role years later, he died four months before that picture opened.

The 1947 screen version of The Pearl was chosen in 2002 for which US honor for historic movies?

National Film Registry selection marks a film as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. This one was shot in Mexico in two versions, one in Spanish and one in English.

In December 1945 The Pearl first reached readers as a short story in which American magazine?

Woman's Home Companion ran it as The Pearl of the World, two years before the expanded book. The monthly was then at its height, with a circulation that peaked above four million.

Before it was a magazine story or a book, The Pearl was begun in 1944 in which form?

A movie script came first, written by an author who knew the story would be filmed. The picture and the finished book then came out in the same year.

Kino in The Pearl shares his name with Eusebio Kino, who explored northwest Mexico in which role?

Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino proved that Baja California is a peninsula, not an island. In the story the priest reminds Kino that he is named after a great man.

In The Pearl, Kino tells Juan Tomás he cannot give up the pearl because it has become what?

His soul, Kino says, would be lost if he gave the pearl up. It is his parting answer to Juan Tomás as the family slips away north in the dark.

Walking back into La Paz at the end of The Pearl, Juana breaks custom by taking which place?

At Kino's side is where Juana walks, not trailing after him as she did when the story began. Critics read the change as a sign that the ordeal has made the two equals.

Where is Kino's baby son lying in the opening scene of The Pearl when danger first appears?

In a hanging box held up by ropes, the baby lies laughing as the threat creeps down one of those ropes toward him.

In The Pearl, which weapon does Kino use against the first thief who creeps into his hut at night?

A knife is all Kino has, and he strikes the thief with it before taking a blow to the head himself. Afterwards he cleans the blade by driving it into the earth.

Who is Juan Tomás's wife in The Pearl, who leads the mourning for the family believed dead?

Apolonia leads the wailing as the nearest female relative, then finds the family alive and hiding in her own house. She fetches her husband and tells no one else.

The Pearl's author grew up in which California farm town, now home to a museum devoted to him?

Salinas and its valley are the backdrop of much of his fiction, which makes The Pearl's Mexican coast a rare departure. A national center in his name stands on the town's Main Street.

Which offer about the great pearl does the doctor make in The Pearl, putting Kino on his guard?

To lock it in his safe is the doctor's helpful suggestion. Kino declines, and the doctor watches his eyes to see where in the hut they flick.

After rejecting the local offers in The Pearl, where does Kino decide he must go to sell his pearl?

To the capital, a place he fears, is where Kino resolves to carry the pearl. Juan Tomás warns that he has defied the whole system he lives under, not just a few dealers.

Where do Juana and the baby hide in The Pearl while Kino creeps down toward the trackers' camp?

In a cave on the mountainside, above the pool where the trackers stop for the night, Juana waits with the baby. Kino strips off his white clothes so he can creep down unseen.

The Pearl's author won a Pulitzer for which earlier novel about a Dust Bowl family's trek west?

The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family, Oklahoma tenant farmers forced off their land in the drought years. Its epic sprawl could hardly be further from The Pearl's brief, fable-like telling.

Unlike the stone and plaster town nearby, Kino's neighbors in The Pearl live in houses made of what?

Brush houses shelter the fishing families on the shore, a short walk from a town of stone, plaster and fancy gardens. News moves between the two worlds at astonishing speed.

The aging priest in The Pearl is said to regard Kino's people, whatever their age, as what?

Children is how the priest thinks of his flock, and he treats them that way. Hearing of the pearl, he cannot recall whether he ever married Kino or baptized his baby.