Assisted pearls are formed by planting spheres of organic material into the farmed oyster shell. This can be in the form of a piece of living tissue, from a mollusc’s mantle, which is dislodged and replaced under the cell lining of another mollusc. The mollusc forms a pearl sac around the ‘foreign body’, which then starts to grow. The key difference in cultivation of this type, is that there is no addition of a bead.

Assisted pearls can also be formed with the introduction of different shaped filaments, placed inside the shell, which the oyster isolates by secreting nacre. These filaments can create beautiful, elongated pearls, which we use to make very unusual necklets.

From time to time, we use quite radically shaped pearls, which have been formed by cutting mollusc tissue out with a ‘pastry-cutter’ type tool. This produces a shaped nucleus which is then coated with nacre, whilst maintaining its original cut-out shape.

The most common types of cultured pearls are made by introducing a spherical glass, or Mother-of-pearl bead and a small piece of tissue from the mantle of a pearl mollusc, into the cell lining of another mollusc. The inserted item stimulates more pearl material to be secreted around the bead, thus coating it with a layer of nacre.

Cultured pearls with bead implants are left to develop between 1 and 3 years. But it is very hard to tell how big the central bead may be, or how thick the coating of nacre is. We generally use cultured pearls which have an organic nucleus, rather than a bead implant.