Stuff You Should Know - Pearls: Second Best Thing About Oysters

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Pearls are super cool. And humans figuring out how to make them is even cooler. Learn all about the most interesting gemstone today!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here. Kind of. I think she went to go open the door for a delivery person. Other than that,

this is Stuff You Should Know. Hey, let's hope it's not the Land Shark from the 1970s Saturday Night Live fame. That's good stuff, man. Hey, you know what? We need to shout out a listener because this was a genuine listener suggestion. We get lots of suggestions and sometimes we take them. Yeah. I have one in the pipeline right now. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'm just going to let it be suspenseful until then. Okay. Whose idea was this? I'm trying to think of which one it might be for you because I know what's in your pipeline, buddy. Okay. We already did the anima's one. I can peek through that scary hole. This is Jamie Buher. Nice name. I didn't even let Jamie know, so hopefully Jamie hears this and it'll just be a big surprise. I know there's a certain listener

out there who is hoping this would be possums, but here's a little hint. If you suggest something too much, it becomes a game where we will never do it. Well, you can ask the guy who continuously asked for the Hawaiian overthrow episode. We kind of did that, didn't we? We did do it, and it's one of the things that you want really bad, and then when you get it, you regret ever having asked for it. Yeah. Just too much buildup. Right. You just got to let things come as they come. Exactly. Chill out. Look in your pipeline. I predict that we normally would have gotten to possums by 2027 easily. Maybe. Never now. Never. Right. Now we want. But today we're talking about pearls, right?

Yeah, pearls, and big thanks to Jamie Buher because this is one, I'm surprised we hadn't done it. It's very stuff you should know-y, just sort of sitting out there at the bottom of the ocean waiting for us to discover it like a pearl diver, which weirdly was not even in this article. No, I thought it was weird too. I did a little research on it, so we'll hit that in a minute, but yeah, same. I read that Steinbeck book. What was it called? The Pearl Diver's Daughter? That was the original title, but he just shortened it, and he just said, what's this called? The Pearl. Oh, okay. I didn't know that was a Steinbeck book. I knew about Grapes of Wrath as I lay dying mainly because of that metal band.

Mm-hmm. Travels with Charlie? Yeah. Of Mice and Men. What's the Canary Row one? Canary Row of Mice and Men. Okay. Of Mice and Men, man. Have you ever seen that with the one with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich as Lenny? No. I saw the previous version when I was a kid that I want to say it was the Quaid, the big boy Quaid. Oh, he'd be perfect for that. Yeah. Randy, and I can't remember who Lenny was. I think I saw pieces of the Malkovich one. Okay. I thought you meant Randy Quaid was Lenny. I can't imagine him as anybody else. Maybe Curly, but no, I think Curly's kind of like a Casey Samosko-esque smaller dude. You know what I mean? Wait, who did I say? Did I get it wrong? Who did I say Randy Quaid was?

You said you couldn't remember who Lenny was. I don't remember the other guy's name, but Lenny's the one who gets old-yellered at the end. Right. I guess I should say spoiler alert, right? Yeah, sure. But if you don't know what that is, he's a cousin Eddie. That's all you need to know. So, Chuck, let's start talking about pearls at this point. What do you think? I think let's do it. Pretty neat little gem. Yeah. You can make a really good argument, and I've seen it made all over the internet, especially from pearl sellers' websites, that pearls are far and away the oldest gem people have ever used to adorn themselves with. I don't know if that's true, but it's possible because you have to mine gold. You have to stumble

upon it. With pearls, I could see people just diving for seafood and being like, what is this thing? And oh, there's another one over here. And then all of a sudden, you've got these gems that are coming out of the Persian Gulf and being a big deal. Yeah. And it was already weird enough that people cracked an oyster open and said, maybe I should eat that disgusting looking blob. I know that's kind of an age-old question. It's like, who ate the first oyster? But when they saw a little pearl in there, I mean, first of all, the interior of any, or not any, but of many mollusk shells can be beautifully iridescent and very attractive to the eye. So, I could see why somebody might crack a mollusk open and just say, hey, this looks

interesting. I wonder if that piece of meat is, tastes good. Yeah. And it does, especially in a nice buttery lemon white wine sauce. I think we should do oysters just separately at some point. Okay. But I found a little pearl. Turns out it was a blister pearl, which means it was, we'll get to this, but it means it's attached to the shell. But I found a little blister pearl one time. And I can't remember if it was just dining in a restaurant or whether it was from a shell when we were like clamming or something. But I thought pearls only came from oysters, and that is not true. They can come from just about any mollusk. Right. But you do make a good point. Any mollusk can make a pearl if you're very inclusive of what forms a pearl, because

they're formed through the same processes. The difference between a true pearl and a non-true pearl, if you're going to be a purist, is the substance that it's made from. And even more mind boggling than that, they're made from the same substance. It's just a different structural arrangement of that same substance that produces a true pearl or a non-true pearl. I think that was enough mystery. Let's get in. Okay. So one of the things that we need to know about pearls, and one of the reasons why they've been, for thousands of years, they were like the great signifier of wealth, is because they're exceedingly rare in nature. Just kind of globally, you'll find a pearl in about one in 10,000 mollusks. That's not very many pearls hanging around out

there. So you can imagine that when a really nice pearl was found, it was very much treasured. And every single pearl, no matter what kind of pearl it is, starts because the little mollusk that forms the pearl is irritated. That's right. You've often heard, you know, a grain of sand can turn into a pearl. That is true. It can be a little chunk of the shell. Most times, it's a little parasite. And it's almost like an allergic reaction takes place inside the mollusk in that they mount a defense by coating this foreign thing that gets in their shell, because their shell is ideally sealed up pretty tight, and they like to keep it nice and clean. But something gets in there, and they go, all right, something's in here, shouldn't be.

I'm going to coat this thing with a substance, and we'll get to what that is in a second. And that substance basically just builds up, and eventually it makes a pearl. And it can be a little blister pearl that's still attached, or ideally what you're going to get to is a perfectly spherical, lovely little thing that could someday end up on a piece of jewelry. Yeah. Now, we should say that one in 10,000 mollusks, if you get 10,000 mollusks together on the beach, you would find a pearl in one of them. It would be even rarer than that to find a perfectly spherical or even close to spherical pearl. Like those are really, really rare in nature, right? But that stuff that makes that pearl, depending on what kind of moss it comes from,

if it's a true pearl, the stuff that they build up to kind of isolate that grain of sand or that parasite or whatever, is called nacre. And nacre is this combination of a kind of calcium carbonate called aragonite. And then another substance, kind of like an organic binder called concleolin. And as different layers are put down, add a little bit of water slowly, but surely like the layer kind of gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and a pearl forms around that. Again, you have to remember this. This thing that we prize and value and think is one of the most beautiful things in the world is a pearl's, like you said, an allergic reaction to an irritant. That's what it's doing. It just so happens that we find them gorgeous and like to wear them on our foreheads.

That's a great place for a pearl. How'd you pronounce that second word? Nacre? Oh, concleolin. Yeah, throwing that L in there. It's very easy to want to do. Concleolin. I get the urge. Yeah, concleolin. And nacre, by the way, is spelled N-A-C-R-E. Great word. For those of you who love it when I just randomly spell things. And nacre, I talked about that beautiful iridescence. It's mother of pearl. That is nacre. So when you look at the inside of a mollusk of a shellfish that has that wonderful sort of rainbowy iridescent look, that is the nacre. And it's really super strong. And I believe it even, it's part of the structural integrity of keeping the mollusks strong, right? Right, yeah. It's like that's

what we would consider like what our bones are made out of. That's what the mollusks, hardness is made out of, I think. Yeah, exactly. At least the interior part. So then there's the other non-true pearls. They're called non-nacreous pearls because they're not made with nacre. They're made with a calciferous concretion, which again is made from calcium carbonate crystals, but it's a different arrangement of calcium carbonate called calcite. And calcite is more stable than aragonite, but it's more fragile and it's just not the same thing as a pearl. Yeah, these are, the non-nacreous are sometimes pink or brown and they generally come from the queen conch. We say conch, right? Or we say conch. Conch. That's what I always said, but I also heard

people say conch one time and I thought it was mispronouncing. No, they were, they were dead wrong. Okay. And this conch mollusk, the queen conch is in the Caribbean, or is it Caribbean? Because I heard someone say it once. It's the Caribbean. Yeah, you have to say it like you're about to sing the Billy Ocean song. Yeah, queen. Yeah, but you can't say queen. You have to just leave everybody hanging. Well, you've never noticed in that song. He goes, Caribbean queen conch in the background. I do want to recommend this story that we're not going to get into here, but Olivia, who helped us with this was kind enough to tease us with a story from 2021 about a Thai fisherman who found a mellow pearl, M-E-L-O, and that's one of the other kinds of

non-nacreous mollusk pearls. And it was worth about 300 grand. These things are really, really rare. You can't make them in nature. So that's why they're rare and you can't make them by human hand, I should say. So they're super rare and they're very fragile. And as a result, they're really expensive. But there's a really good story about this Thai fisherman who found one worth a lot of money and just go look it up on the internet and read about it. But it's pretty involved. So like you said, the non-nacreous pearls are made by the mellow-mallow sea snail or the queen conch mollusk. But the true pearls are typically made by saltwater oysters or freshwater mussels. Like when you're thinking of a pearl pearl, it probably came from a mussel,

possibly from Ohio or Tennessee of all places. Yeah, the Tennessee River. That was one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever heard. Or if it's saltwater oysters, it might be on the northern coast of South America. It might be in the Baja, the Gulf of California off the Baja in Mexico. Those are some really good spots for it too. Or it could also be in places in Japan as we'll see too. Yeah, and the Tennessee River and a couple of these other places are some of the only places where people still dive for pearls. Because again, as you'll see, most pearls that we see today are made by people, well, people and mollusks. Sure, in conjunction. Yeah. But we can talk just for

a little bit about pearl diving. That was how they used to find pearls. And if you think, well, I get oysters, I live near the ocean and I get oysters just in my oyster trap a few feet down, those are almost certainly not going to be making pearls. The pearl-bearing mollusks are generally very, very, very deep. And these divers, it was kind of the, I don't know if it was the reason people started free diving so deep, but people who were really good at free diving so deep often became pearl divers in free diving or the people that eventually they would get a mask, but they would, you just go down there with your lungs and swim super, super, super deep. Yeah. And that's what the Steinbeck novel is about.

So, like I saw that a pearl diver might dive down to 120 feet, 150 feet. That's deep. Yeah, that's like 50 meters if you're paying attention. That is extremely deep. That's actually beyond like the recreational scuba divers limits. I think that's like 90 or 100 feet. So, these people are free diving that deep. And yeah, they're having to hold their breath for many, many minutes, but they're pretty good at it. And the reason why I think they have to dive so low and the reason why you're not going to find a pearl in an oyster along the shoreline is because the flow of water has to be below a certain speed or else the nacre is just not going to form correctly or at all from what I can tell. So, they can be just sitting real still?

Yeah, exactly, for sure. Should we take a break? Sure. We'll take a break and we'll come back and talk a little history because it turns out people have liked pearls for a really long time. you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story

of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses,

major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we're back and we're talking pearl history. And from what I could tell, for about 4,000 years, the vast majority of pearls came from around the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Manar by Sri Lanka. And that was just the way it was. If you had a pearl

before about the 1920s or 30s, it was very likely that it came from one of those areas in about the Middle East or Southeast Asia. Yeah. And they were, like you said, they were always prized. Obviously, if you look at a pearl, anytime something really that beautiful comes from nature that's that rare, it becomes a precious item. And from the very beginning, and I mean, you name it, in most ancient places where you could get pearls, they were written about, they were prized and worn by the nobility, maybe nobility, definitely kings and queens, maybe sometimes only kings and queens. And not even like lower nobility, they were that rare. But they also kind of hoarded them, like their stories of ancient queens having like hundreds and hundreds of pearls.

It's not like they just had like, oh, we found one and the rest other people can wear. Yeah. I think the oldest pearl necklace that was found comes from about 2,400 years ago or 2,300 years ago in a place that was called Susa, which we now recognize as Iran. And it was in a princess's sarcophagus. And it was a pearl necklace of 216 pearls. It's a lot of pearls. It is a lot of pearls, especially considering, again, like just any normal pearl is found in one in 10,000 mollusks. And this princess had 216 pearls. So she would have been what you would call fabulously wealthy at the time. Native American cultures prized the pearl as well. As you'll see, if you can find them in the Tennessee River, then you can, there are other places in the Midwest of the United States

where you can find pearls still today. So they love them and use them. I think Mother of Pearl has always been used. The ancient Egyptians definitely used it as far as 4,200 BCE, even though they got pearls much later. Yeah, apparently it wasn't until they were conquered by the Persian Empire about the 6th century BCE that they finally got pearls, which does not make sense to me, but, you know, them's the breaks history. This Cleopatra story is pretty interesting. I think we talked about this in our Cleopatra episode. I'm pretty sure it sounds awfully familiar. It did. As the legend goes, she bet Mark Antony that she could present the most expensive dinner ever made. And he was like, all right, let's see what you got. I think there's

a catch and there was a catch because supposedly pearl earrings were crushed into powder and dissolved into wine and she went game on. She famously went and then downed her pearl shot of vinegar. Yeah. And supposedly he said, no, thank you. No, that's too opulent from war. Yeah, I can't, I don't know if that would be bad for you or probably just benign. Well, it depends because there's a lot of cultures over the years as we'll see that have basically prized pearls for all sorts of medicinal values along the way, like everybody from the Hindus to the Taoists to ancient Sanskrit medical texts like the Shakara, Samhita, all basically said, hey, pearls are really good for everything from prolonging youth to curing weak eyes. It's

an elixir to restore strength. Like I think anytime there's something that is valuable as a thing of beauty, they also just assume that it has some sort of health properties as well and pearls were definitely in that realm. I'm curious if there's anything to any of that, if there's been like modern studies on pearl dust. Well, I know they put pearl dust in some skin creams too and it supposedly adds a youthful glow to your skin, but that smacks to me of basically the same thing as Sanskrit medical texts saying it restores strength and youthfulness. And you know that because you use it, right? Maybe, it's still worth a try.

Once the Crusades got going in the medieval era, they started trading with Asia. All these pearls were coming to Europe. And again, and once they made their way to Europe, they were basically off limits. There are actually sumptuary laws that said you can't have them common people. You can't have anything nice. That's what all these laws are about. Yeah. Supposedly it was to really keep the class delineations in order, but also it's supposedly to prevent the lower classes from engaging in wanton spending that they couldn't afford, you know, in like a form of vice, like luxury basically. The thing is now we have credit card. Right. Right. It's the opposite of a sumptuary law. The thing is apparently Scotland

has really nice pearls. And I saw in more than one place that the story goes that Caesar actually invaded Britain because he was after UK pearls at the time, although it wasn't the UK. You know what I'm saying. We still get those emails all the time. For sure. Like if you put a gun to our head, we could come up with it, but just sometimes on the fly it's hard to remember. Well, and sometimes when we say English or England, we're talking about England. I think the official, right, right. But yeah, exactly. But I think the official thing is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I think I can hear some people in Europe clapping right now. Well, speaking of them, the colonizers, of course, once they started making their way

around the world and plundering everything, they obviously took wherever there were pearls, they would take and harvest those pearls and send them back to Europe again. Whether it was Panama or Mexico or places in South America, wherever they went and they had pearls, they were right for the taken. And again, they went back to the court generally. Men wore pearl earrings apparently in Henry's court. Elizabeth had thousands and thousands of pearls that were, you know, hey, a pearl button looks much nicer than a real button or just a pearl adornment. And so let's just use those instead of regular buttons. Yeah, one thing that I found mind-blowing was that her gowns would have thousands of pearls sewn into them. And that when

you clean the gown, you had to take all the pearls off and then clean it and then sew all the pearls back on too. Can you imagine? You know what? I bet if you told that story back then and Elizabeth was in the room, she would say, really? They do that? Right, probably. And by the way, off with your head. Right, for telling me that story. I don't like guilt. Man, that was a great Elizabeth, the first impression. Thank you. So onward and upward, Chuck, because in the late, late 19th century, in 1896 in particular, a guy named Gaston Vives became the first human being, as far as we know, to set up a genuine large-scale commercial oyster farming operation with the express purpose of producing as many pearls as possible. Pretty good idea in 1896. It is. And

what's the word I'm looking for? Where something happens in ratio form? Okay, I know where you're going. How about this? Because pearls are so rare, Vives said, I'm going to overcome this by just having gobs and gobs and gobs of oysters, so that just I'll beat the odds. And in fact, he beat the odds big time because he was farming oysters and harvesting anywhere between four to 14 pearls per 100 oysters. So he was having a four to 14% yield of pearls. Pretty good, right? Well, I mean, way better than what we said to begin with, which is one in 10,000. Right. So he was harvesting up to 14% of pearls, or harvesting pearls from 14% of his oysters. The worldwide estimate would be harvesting

pearls from 0.0001% of oysters that you would find. Yeah. And I don't think we said this is in Mexico. And of course, these are reports that this happened. And 14% is the very highest end. It was four to 14. But let's say it's 4%. That's still a lot more. And the only thing that people can reckon is that it was just a place where they had a lot more pearls, because that can happen. Yeah, the conditions must have just been just perfect right there in the Gulf of Mexico. So good for guests on Vives. But one really important thing to remember about Vives' operation is he was farming them naturally. Again, he was overcoming the odds just by sheer numbers of oysters he was raising. But he also figured out some really important stuff too, that the better

you take care of your oysters, the more you protect them from predators, the more you protect them from disease, the more you scrub them free of barnacles several times a year, the likelier they are to produce a really nice pearl. And so he established some techniques that I believe are still kind of foundational in pearl culturing today. But he did not try to artificially implant or get, I guess, jumpstart pearl creation in oysters. He was just letting it happen naturally. So he wasn't technically culturing pearls. He was just farming oysters for their pearls. Yeah, cultivating, right? I'd say culturing. No, I mean, he would have been cultivating. Oh, sure, sure. Grooming, breeding, raising. Beating the odds.

If you want to talk about making pearls, culturing pearls, of course, you got to look to ancient China. They're the first people that kind of started doing that. They put little molds. This is very cool. They put little molds that had different things, but chiefly little Buddha images into mussels, freshwater mussels, around 500 CE. And they would develop those blister pearls that I talked about that I found one time that are attached to the interior of the shell. And it would be in about the same shape. It's not like it produced a perfect little Buddha blister pearl, but looked enough like it to where it was a pretty ingenious thing. I think the blister pearls are called half pearls or hemispherical. They're not obviously

prized and the kind that you want to put on a necklace, but it kind of got the ball rolling as far as knowing that we can culture pearls. Right. They would say it either looks like Buddha or Abraham Lincoln, guaranteed. So a long time after that, people started really trying to figure out how to intensively cultivate pearls or culture pearls. No, I'm confused, but there was a guy named William Seville Kent who was English, believe it or not. And he was a marine biologist working in Australia. And he said, you know, I really think this guest on Vives guy is on to something. But I think he's missing the point. He's just kind of letting nature take its course, beating the odds, you could say. And instead, Seville Kent wanted to kind of like hasten

nature, to kind of like increase his chances even further by trying to figure out how to make pearls happen, unnaturally, I guess. And he never got any further than creating blister pearls, which from what I can tell is the easiest pearl you could possibly make. And he died in 1908, and he just never cracked that code. But shortly after that, in another part of the world in Japan, there were some guys who've been working on this independently, and they did crack that code finally. They did. And we should mention the reason that they wanted to speed up the pearlness of the world was not only just to obviously make more money if they could control something like that, but in Australia and in Japan, these mollusks were overfished at the time, which meant obviously

they were underperled. And so they kind of had like, there was a need created for pearls that wasn't being met. So all of a sudden, they started saying, hey, we can, if we can make a blister pearl, maybe we can carry this over and make regular real pearls. And in Japan, there's the Okoya oyster. It's hard to say fast. And abalone, which is like a big, very expensive kind of seafood. It's a sea snail. Oh, is it? And, huh? It is? Yeah, abalone? Yeah, I didn't know that. What do you think it was? I thought it was more clam-like than snail-like. That was my guess. Well, it's called a sea snail, but it looks like a clam. Oh, okay. There you go. It's one of those things. Sort of like it. Oh, never mind. I'm not gonna say that. I want to know, you have to text it to me. Oh,

that's okay. Well, yeah, I'll text it to you. Okay. So these two things, the Okoya oyster and the abalone in Japan and the waters around Japan had very nice natural pearls being produced. Again, under-pearl because of overfishing. And in 1888, there was an oyster farmer who figures very highly in the story name. And this gets a little confusing because a lot of the names are similar. Really? But his name was Kokichi Mikimoto. And he started working with a professor named Kachiki. Is that right? Kokichi. Kokichi Mitsukuri. And he was from Tokyo Imperial University. And they started working together, trying to get a technique going for initially growing these blistered pearls. And they were successful in that not only could they get that

going, but they could actually industrialize it and make it like a really ramp up the process and get a lot of them going. Yeah, Mikimoto's aim for starting to cultivate pearls was because he wanted to democratize pearls. He wanted anybody at the time to be able to wear a pearl necklace. And that's why he said about trying to figure this out. And again, like you said, the best they could come up with were blistered pearls. And they call them half pearls for a reason because you have to break them off of the shell, the inner shell. And so you've ruined one side of it. Whereas a true pearl will form inside the oyster and can just be kind of plucked out rather easily. And it's a whole pearl that's not attached to the shell. So it seems like if you could make

a blistered pearl, you could make a true pearl. And it just was not that easy. And neither Mikimoto nor Mitsukuri ever figured it out, really. It was actually a student of Mitsukuri's, a guy named Tokichi Nishikawa, who actually came up with the way to create a genuine pearl through cultivation practices. And the same process is essentially used today. Yeah, it's basically what they did was they said, Hey, let's take what nature does. And that's like what we have to sit around and wait every 10,000 molests to see happen. And let's just do it ourselves. Let's figure out a way to speed it up and do it by hand. And they did, they would cut out that, you know, we talked about the nacre, they would cut out the part of the oyster, which is the mantle that secretes that nacre,

they would artificially put in a little bit of shell instead of like a grain of sand, they would use, I think they found that a little like a round cutting of that iridescent shell works best, right? I think they found that muscle shells work best for some reason, but yeah, they would make them round or spherical. Right. And then they would put that back into another oyster. I think of the same variety. I don't think they'd mix and matched. And that would basically cause that process to start. They would say something's in me that shouldn't be in me. And it would create a little pearl sack and has that little seed in the middle. And it started just coating it with that substance. Yeah. And so they would surgically implant shell pieces and like a piece of mantle from another

oyster, which is kind of Mengele-esque if you think about it. And they would use little tiny modified dental tools to create this surgery. And it was really hard to do because you can't open an oyster shell more than two to three centimeters, which is not much. Or else it's either going to kill the oyster or it's going to upset it so much that it's going to reject this implanted nucleus, the seed for the pearl. So it's really hard to do. And again, this is still the way that they do this. And it turns out, strangely, there was an entirely other guy named Tatsui Misei. He was a carpenter. And he was working on his own version of the exact same thing, apparently independently at the same time in Japan. And he and Nishikawa went to go patent their methods,

found that the other one had applied for a patent for the exact same thing and came to an agreement, which I think is really sweet. Because had it been like Thomas Edison or somebody, there would have been like legal battles and murders of elephants and all that stuff. These guys just came to an agreement to call this process the Misei Nishikawa method. Right. Some people say that we talked about Seville Kent who died without having perfected the non-blistered process. Some accounts do say that both of these people, which is basically how they were working independently on the same process, got their process from notes from Seville Kent. But I don't think that's been proven out. So

who knows? It's just part of the lore at this point. Well, yeah. I mean, plus Seville Kent never cracked the blister pearl barrier. Yeah. The old BBB? Right, yeah. Or BBB? BBB. The blister pearl barrier. Yeah, the BBB. So Mickey Modo, who just as a refresher, was that original oyster farmer in 1888, was a really good promoter, really good marketer, had a pretty good operation going. In fact, the company is still around today and they still make pearl jewelry. But they would build these big pearl structures at displays, at expo shows,

and he would go around and talk to governments and say, hey, this jewelry is like, I know we're making them by hand, but it's still a real pearl. Look at these things. Yeah. And sort of had to overcome the, these aren't true pearls argument. Yeah, the diamondique challenge. Yeah. But he did overcome it. The thing is, is they're just not as valuable, not because they're not real pearls. They are real pearls that are made from the same stuff and everything. It's just that humans have intervened and taken happenstance out of the process, right? The reason that they're

not as expensive is because there's so many of them. You can produce them so much more easily. And so, Mickey Modo actually did what he set out to accomplish. He democratized pearls. And now you can get a strand of pearl, like a pearl necklace for like a hundred bucks, if you want. And they're beautiful, gorgeous pearls that if somebody came up and said, which one's the natural pearl and which one's the cultivated pearl, you would not be able to tell. No, not at all. They were brought over to America in at a really bad time just before the Great Depression in 1928, but they hung around. And then after the Great Depression, people started buying pearls and pearl necklaces. And another thing that happened was they started

making just straight up imitation pearls. And these look great too. And Jackie Kennedy's very famous pearl necklace was not real. It was a gift from her mother. They were artificial pearls. I think a lot of times the pearl necklaces that you see can be artificial. And they sell like hotcakes too. Yeah, I looked it up. I could not find for certain what Jackie Kennedy's pearls were made of. But the closest I saw was a guess at glass that they were made of glass, everybody. Yeah, there's been apparently all kinds of things, glass, alabaster. And then they would put everything from egg white to fish scales to snail slime to create that, you know, pearl has a certain look. It's not just like a plastic one looks plastic for a reason, but a good artificial

pearl has a little magic to it as well. Yeah, opalescence. Do we take a break? I think so. All right, we'll take our last break and we'll come back and finish up with what's going on today in the world of pearls. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband,

Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're

going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. We're in modern times now and things are still about the same. About 90% of the pearls, like genuine pearls that you're going to get are cultured. It is, if you'd say I want a pearl necklace and I want it to be only pearls found that are natural pearls, then you got a lot of money laying around and you're pretty picky. Yeah. But you can thank Mikimoto for not having to have to have a lot of money laying around or to be particularly picky. And there's a bunch of types of cultured pearls. There's a Koya, South Sea, Tahitian and freshwater. And depending on the type of mollusk that's used, it's going to produce different colored gems basically. Because I don't

know if we said or not, a pearl is considered a gem even though it's not like a mineral in the sense that like a diamond is, but it still has a crystalline structure. So I guess it's considered a gem, plus people just like to wear them on their foreheads, as I said. But if you want a black pearl, you're going to have to go down to Tahiti and get one from the black lip oyster, which is just all around cool. Yeah, they are cool. And they're not necessarily all black. They can be gray, they can be brown, they can be black. But they'll also have like kind of iridescent hints of like greens or purples, even pink I saw. Oh, pink pearls? Well, pink black pearls, which is mind-blowing. If you're talking about just sort of the standard traditional classic pearl,

they are produced in Japan and China. And those are those original cultured Koya pearls still to this day. And then I guess, you know, the freshwater pearls, those are the ones that come from the Tennessee River, among other places. Freshwater mussels produce them. They are not as expensive. They come in all kinds of shapes and sizes from lakes and ponds and I guess rivers if it's the Tennessee River. Sure. And there are also little things called like rice pearls that look like what you would think look like little grains of rice. They tried to perfect the process of getting them less rice-like over the years and found that if they just switched the species of mussel, then they could do that and it worked. Yes. And here's a little tip for you. If you want to

impress everyone at the country club, you obviously belong to. Next time you see somebody wearing pearls that are not spherical, tell them you love their Baroque pearls because a Baroque pearl is anything but a round shaped pearl. Yeah. If you look up Baroque pearl necklace, it looks almost like a necklace of molars. Yeah, weirdly they do. And that's a natural looking pearl. Again, a perfectly spherical, even close to perfectly spherical pearl is really rare in nature. And so more often than not, you're going to see everything from like blobby, misshapen ones that, like you said, look like molars, ones that are like teardrop shaped. There's a bunch of different cool shapes that can be produced as natural pearls. And all of those are Baroque.

Right. It is still kind of a rare thing to cultivate successfully or to culture successfully a pearl. They've gotten the process down pretty good, but it takes about 10 to 18 months and about half of the oysters even survive that nucleation process like you were talking about about. Because it's really just very, very precise and is very finicky. And of those half, only about 5% will end up producing a high quality pearl. So when you're pearl culturing, I was about to say farming, I guess it's farming in a way, you are making most of your profit about 90% from those that 5% of the 50% end up becoming high quality pearls. And you can still do some stuff with a non-high quality, but you're not going to get the big top dollar

prices. And again, that's just from culture pearls. Again, it just kind of reminds you how really rare the really nice natural ones are. And you said that it takes 10 to 18 months. I saw in some cases they'll give the pearl up to four years to develop. And while they're cultivating or culturing the oysters, the pearls in the oysters, they will scrub the oysters three times a year, protect them from predators and disease. These are like the most well-cared for oysters, which is great. But again, they've had some other foreign objects surgically implanted in them. And then when the pearl is taken out, I don't believe the oyster typically survives that process, which if you really stop and think about it is pretty mean. It's actually a really

mean, torturous process. They're cared for while they're being raised. It's true, but they're killed to get the pearl out of them. They're just basically a machine to produce a pearl is how the pearl industry views oysters or other mollusks that produce pearls for it. Well, hopefully they become dinner and then part of someone's driveway. They definitely do not necessarily, no. And one of the, I think what Gaston Vives actually might have come up with this technique if it's not older, but I think it's still in use in places. They'll harvest the oysters when it's pearl harvesting time. And just to make the process easier, they'll dump the oysters into huge piles, cover the piles so that things can't get to them,

like predators or like vultures or whatever, and let the oysters rot. And then the pearls are just easier to retrieve after the fleshy part of the oyster is gone. Truly some of those dudes are eating the oysters. Some of them are. And if you, how about this, Chuck? I've got a little, a little fact for you that's going to keep you off of oysters forever. You don't, if you're eating a raw oyster, you're not eating a dead oyster. I know. Everyone does that. It's a, oh really? I didn't realize that. Really?

Yeah. No, I'd never really thought about it, but there's, they're probably dead, but if they're dead, they're freshly dead. And they're so freshly dead, it's possible that they're not actually dead yet. So you might be eating them live when you eat them raw. I hadn't thought about that. It makes me sad. Yeah. I think they, once you, I mean, you've shucked oysters before. I have not. You know that process? Really? No, I have my oyster shucked for me.

Well, part of the shucking process involves cutting it loose from its shell, where it's attached. And I think that's, that's that lifeline. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey, it's, it's a renewable resource, but PETA obviously is going to say, no, making pearls is not something people do just because you're, you're messing with an animal to get something from it. Yeah. So PETA is of course going to be against it.

Sure. And there is like a moral question about it is morally questionable, but there are some real upsides to it. One is it gives another industry to, to areas that might be subject to overfishing so that they don't have to overfish just to make money. They can raise oysters as well for pearls. The oysters definitely clean the water in the area that they filter out all sorts of impurities and problems. So that actually does make the water cleaner. And as long as they're not messing with like the coral reefs or the local ecosystems to, to create these farms, they're doing it in a more sustainable manner. It actually is a fairly sustainable industry.

It's just again, mean to the oysters or other mollusks. Are you off oysters now? I don't know. You'll have to ask me when somebody presents me with a platter of them and some crackers and, and a mignonette. Mignonette, you got to order that stuff. You just randomly get presented with platters of oysters. What kind of life are you living? At the country club when I wear my string of molar pearls. Should we go over kind of quickly a couple of these expensive famous pearls?

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, if you want to talk about super expensive, super huge pearls, there are a handful that, you know, sometimes they look like super large molars. Sometimes they look like Libya described one as looking like a, a giant white brain. They are, they're not very good looking. Yet they can be really expensive, just as prized collectibles, I think. Right. It's not like, I don't think they've discovered a process where they can take a big, large brain looking oyster and break it down into, or a pearl and break it down into like

5,000 perfect little pearls, right? No, not that I know of. No, it's more just like they prize it for its weirdness and rarity. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, I think the biggest one we could find is the 75 pound pearl of Puerto. And the thing is, whenever one of these comes out, everybody's like, that's so expensive. It's so valuable. That one was valued at $100 million. And it was found by a fisherman who kept it under his bed for a decade in the Philippines. Now, all of a sudden he's sitting on a $100 million pearl, or I should say sleeping over one.

But it's never been sold. So no one knows if it actually is worth that. It's worth whatever somebody will pay for it basically. Exactly. It's a very good point. But there is one called La Peregrina, and it is arguably the most famous pearl in the world. It's an egg shaped pearl. It's been fashioned into different necklaces and different jewelry. It's appeared in portraits of queens, including I believe Elizabeth the first, and then a bunch of Spanish queens over the years, because it was part of the Spanish crown jewels. And then it finally made its way into a necklace that Richard Burton bought for Elizabeth Taylor

in 1969 very famously. So in that neat, imagine wearing a piece of jewelry that you knew was in a portrait of a queen that was made hundreds, several hundred years ago. And now you're wearing it too. That's just cool. That's one thing I like about stuff like this, like a pearl is something that can make its way through time and history from person to person. Yeah. And part of Hollywood history. I mean, one of the great off and on romances in Hollywood history. Some people would prize it just for that from Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor's neck. And I think we should also mention at least the people like, come on, I don't care about giant molars and brain looking things. Guys, what is the biggest like pearl pearl? Like the biggest,

really round, natural looking pearl. And I think the biggest one they found is about, and it's pretty big if you think about a near spherical pearl, about 0.7 inches. Right. That's big. It's 33 carats. If you know anything about diamonds, imagine a 33 carat diamond, but a pearl instead. And I think it sold for a million dollars in 2014, appropriately enough. A million buckaroos. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, Chuck's got nothing else. I've got nothing else. And since I just said that out loud, that means it's time for listener mail. And I'm going to call this, which is usually your trumpet howl. Would you like me to do it? Yeah, please. Oh, you went an octave higher.

Yeah. Very impressive. The Stuff You Should Know 5K is all set and ready for another year. Yeah. If you're listening, you don't know what this is. The Stuff You Should Know army, on the Facebook page, they get together, they plan out a 5K race slash walk. And it's just a very fun community event that happens all over the world, I think. It's not like they all meet together in Kansas, that Aaron Cooper's house and run from his driveway to the nearest grocery store, which is at least 5K. They do this at the same time in the spirit of all being together. And the dates are October 21st to October 31st. So it's a rolling race. It is they took a vote online. And the title of the race this year is the 2022 SY 5K is ready.

Are you in commemoration of the 10-year anniversary of the Camry ad that ran? It's probably still running for all I know. It definitely is on some episodes somewhere. There is an event page. If you want to find out more, they're getting all the details worked out still. But I wanted to drop this early. Just go to the Stuff You Should Know army Facebook page. Do a little search for the 5K. They probably have something pinned. There is a listener named Sarah Denny Whatmore who suggested a costume element if people are into that. And they're working out the prizes and things. And it's all going. So if you're into community and exercise and being a part of something cool, go check it out. And this,

of course, was an update from Aaron Miesel. Aaron Miesel. Aaron, I don't know which way I've said it in the past, but I'm saying Miesel. Miesel, it's probably just Miesel. Aaron's great. She's been around forever. She was a movie crusher too. And that was still a thing. Yeah. And she's a longtime member of the Stuff You Should Know army and maybe even the chair of the Stuff You Should Know 5K. I'm not sure. She's definitely up there. And if you want to be like Aaron and let us know something awesome happening, we want to hear about it. You can send it to us in an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are

wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball,

international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.