‘Women spend more money on their ears in pearl earrings than on any other part of their person.’ So said Pliny the Elder, who disapproved of the increasing fashion for pearls in the 1st century. It’s lucky he’s not around now to see the V&A’s new exhibition Pearls (until 19 January), where there are natural, cultured and freshwater ones in abundance (including, at the end of the show, eight buckets stuffed with cheap freshwater ones from China, which produces — overproduces — more than 2,000 tons of pearls a year).
Pearls do not, as I thought, form around grains of sand in an oyster shell but are made by a parasite — mostly larvae of tapeworms — entering and disrupting the cells of a mollusc, which then secretes ‘nacre’ round the foreign object that over time becomes a pearl.
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