Pearl Education

SSEF turns 50 in 2022!
Test your knowledge (all the answers can be found on our website) with 10 questions about SSEF and gems and enter the draw to win three fantastic prizes.

First prize: ATC Pearl Course (value 1600 Swiss Francs) on 7-8 November 2022, with economy airfare and three nights hotel in Basel covered by SSEF. We are not responsible for visa or food expenses.
Second prize: A free SSEF report for one loose cut diamond, gemstone or pearl of your choice. Shipping is free if you...

Pearls in the Web of Life – Part 1

Pearls are not only a product of a living being -a mollusk- but their “mother mollusk” is also a host for dozens of other life-forms! When we think about other animals that we use in our lives (as a food source or as a luxury good, such as furs) we can rarely imagine these creatures being a part of something larger or co-existing with other animals from varied species. We may picture a henhouse bursting with chickens, or a pen full of cows, but we find it...

Pearls in the Web of Life – Part 3

In our last entry, where we learned that the outside of pearl oysters acts as a small ecosystem in itself, but now we will “dive deeper” into the oysters themselves to find that this pattern repeats itself -in a kind of Hermetic understanding of the “As is Above, is Below” law- but with different actors involved. And, if you ever had the opportunity to stare into a live and open pearl oyster, you would begin experiencing a calmness that emanates from these...

This is a Special Educational entry, but I believe it may be of value to some of our new visitors; it originates from an email I received just a week ago, but I have received this type of e-mails many, many times before... so, I will take this opportunity to have this information to the widest audience possible. The e-mail would say something like this:

Hello!
I'm writing from X country to ask you:
Some time ago I had lunch at a seafood restaurant, and I found a pearl inside a...

You have probably seen those photos of beautiful pearls that have been "cut in half" so you can see their inner structure, and you probably wondered how those are worked: are they sawed off? maybe a machete?


Well, wonder no more! This little video explains in detail how you can make your very own, very nice...pearls in half.

You will need:
Sandpaper sheets, one of each: 60 (very rough), 80 (medium grit) and 220 (fine grit, also called "water sandpaper").
Scissors
A small container...

In a sense, pearl oysters might be a “small ecosystem” of their own, a self-contained biome where a tug of war ensues and leads to eventual stability. But why does this happen? And does it hurt the mollusk? One of my Marine Biology teachers -Dr Fernando Manrique, a friend of Jacques Cousteau- once told us that the Ocean was teeming with Life, and that the hardest thing for many lifeforms to find was an “available apartment”, a place to settle and that would help them avoid being tossed...