The advent and rise to power of the cultured pearl has killed the natural pearl. Of the three hundred natural pearl dealers in the rue Lafayette or rue Châteaudun quarter of Paris, there remain less than a handful of dealers!
The fine white pearl has for sometime no longer existed unless purchased dismantled from some ancient brooch or necklace. Until one day there appeared a new exceptional natural pearl, the pink pearl of the Caribbean, a pearl which has seduced the greatest jewellers, from Tiffany to Mikimoto, from Kashikey to Boghossian, from David Morris to Stefan Hemmerle. This pearl had already in the 1850’s charmed the Royal and Imperial courts of England and Russia not to mention the finance barons of the United States, before it fell into oblivion around 1930.
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The PINK PEARL, a natural treasure of the Caribbean.
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The pink pearl of the Caribbean is produced by the giant strombi - Strombus gigas for naturalists. The queen conch is a shellfish well-known to the Caribbeans and to tourists basking on all the beaches whether in the islands or on the region’s continental coastline. This animal is indeed the emblematic sea-snail of the Antilles, the Honduras, Belize, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos islands and the Dominican Republic. The seductive appeal of the Strombus owes much to its fine orange-pink hue and particularly to its tasty flesh for which it has earned the tragic merit of being henceforward classed among the threatened species. The conch delivers to fishermen pearls of great beauty, pink, orange, or white in colour, including a host of intermediary tones. The intensely pink pearls remain the most sought after. A single pearl worthy of top jewellery is found for every hundred thousand shells fished. Known stocks remain little more than several tens of thousands of pearls. This stock however permits sustaining a regular production of jewellery from the big names like Tiffany and Mikimoto for example.
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Pink shellfish and palm-trees: the conch is an emblematic shellfish for the Caribbean. 1 out of 100,000 may contain an exceptional pearl. Photo C. Creutz, Strasbourg. |
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Conch fisherman off the coast of Belize. Fishing for this shellfish is an essential economic activity, threatened by the growing rarity of the Strombus gigas species. The pearl is so rare that it has no real economic significance. It is the cherry on the cake, a stroke of luck for any fisherman who finds one. Photo C. Creutz, Strasbourg. |
The Caribbean pink pearl has the same chemical composition as the mother of pearl, but its structure is different. Mother of pearl is made of calcium carbonate in platelets, which provoke the well-known lustre of pearls. In the pink pearl the calcium carbonate needles play differently with light. Light flames spread across the surface of the pearl, creating a watered effect analogous to the diffusion of light on the most precious of silks. These flames are of an exceptional beauty and are magnificently displayed in this book through the quality of the photographic campaign a tribute to the beauty of these pearls.
In the flames a colour is introduced varying from deep pink to white and from cream to yellow. Deep pink pearls remain the most sought after. When the pearl has a regular form, a beautiful colour and a superb flame play, it will be negotiated for several thousand euros
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These three magnificent pink pearls show the much sought after light effects known as “flames.” The biggest pearl measures 14 mm. It is valued to at least 10 000 Euros. (Photo Tino Hammid). |
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Brooch in the form of a magnolia flower, bearing in the centre the largest known pink pearl The “Queen of the Bahamas” weighs 109.11 carats. The petals of the flower are sculpted in the queen conch shell. Private Collection, Geneva. |
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