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We dove deep into the Pearls category in the Yahoo! Directory and searched the oceans blue to discover that pearl-making is a pretty involved process. How long it takes depends upon how big of a pearl you want. Any mollusk with a shell can create a pearl. In fact, the same materials that create the animal's shell go into the pearl itself. Contrary to popular opinion, it's not always an irritating grain of sand that prods an oyster into making a pearl. More likely, a stray food particle gets stuck
under the shell. The mollusk coats the irritant with layers of aragonite and conchiolin, and the composite material is called nacre. That is what gives pearls their luster. At least one species of oyster can secrete nacre over an irritant at a rate of about 0.1mm to 0.2mm per year. But mollusks rarely create pearls naturally -- only one out of 10,000 animals will produce a pearl in the wild. Since the 1930s, the vast majority of pearls have been created with the help of humans. Cultured pearls are created by surgically implanting a bead or piece of shell
into a mature oyster. The bead or shell becomes the irritant around which the oyster naturally forms layers of nacre. The bigger the irritant, the bigger the final pearl. Successfully implanted oysters are returned to the ocean or a lake to grow the pearls. The pearls are harvested anywhere from one to three years after implantation, depending on conditions in the pearl farm and the size of the pearls desired.
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