Open each oyster to reveal a natural pearl! Pearls and oysters will naturally vary in color, shape, and size making every piece a unique surprise. Open and soak the oyster in water, then find a small gap and use a butter knife to gently pry open the shell halves and find the pearl inside the soft tissue. Clean pearl with a damp cloth and table salt.
No Grit - No Pearl
You might have heard about the mythical "grain of sand" which will grow into a beautiful shiny PEARL...The popular belief that a PEARL is formed as a result of a grain of sand entering a shell is false. Sorry! Pearls are a product of living shelled creatures called mollusks that live in saltwater seas and oceans or freshwater lakes and rivers all over the world. These mollusks live at the bottom of seas and lakes in the sand, sand is their environment, and the sand doesn't really bother them. The pearls are formed when an intruder/irritant (foreign material, usually such as a bit of coral, sharp object, or parasite) accidentally gets into the soft tissue of a mollusk and cannot be expelled. As a defense mechanism, to reduce irritation the animal produces secretions called Nacre (aka Mother of Pearl, the same secretion it uses for shell-building) that coats the irritant. Many layers of nacre coating are deposited on the irritant, some of the time can be resulting in a smooth, beautiful shiny pearl.
There are about 85,000 known types of mollusk (which includes snails, slugs, and squids amongst others) but only 20 of these have the shiny shells needed to make pearls.
