The Cellar - June 28th, 2019: Pearls before Swine

Pearls are sold alongside Diamonds and other precious stones, but they are completely different. Stones shine and glitter, pearls glow.
Pearls aren't stones although they start out as a stone annoying the mollusk so it coats the stone with nacre making it bigger with each layer.
Sitting on a golf ball isn’t more comfortable than on a marble, so wild pearls are rarely round.
Quite often they produce wild shapes, Quasimotos of pearldom. I think they’re the best because they are each 1of1, unique, and still glow.

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As souvenirs from the depths of New World waters in the 15th century, they were simply something diamonds, emeralds, and rubies could never be: alive. Pearls were ghostly. They were animal, and alien. They ushered in a quiet war and a “Pearl Rush” of their own that nearly drove ye olde rich people mad, and became the ultimate status symbol. Luckily for us, nowhere is the curious, charged heritage of pearls more deliciously captured than through the tradition of pearly Renaissance figurine pendants.

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Trade with Italy, which was filled with master gold and pearl jewelers, hit a stride in the 1400s and opened up the demand for them amongst the wealthy across Europe. The introduction of pearls from the Americas, of course, truly launched the “Pearl Age,” in which the gems were so popular the elite started passing actual laws about who could and who couldn’t wear them in the upper echelons of society. For so many members of the population, they were an elusive, incomprehensible form of currency that could be traded for many uses (medicinal, spiritual, aesthetic). Kind of like the bitcoins of the Renaissance, if you will.

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It wasn’t until the dawn of the 20th century that pearls became less, well, intense through the rise of cultured pearls. Still, the Victorian Era often revisited the grotesque gems from the Renaissance in their own creations, and it looks like British jewelers such as Rowlandson will craft the occasional pearly piece in the Renaissance tradition.

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