Mother-of-pearl is the hard, silvery, internal layer of several kinds of shells, especially oysters, the large varieties of which in the Indian Seas secrete this coat of sufficient thickness to ...

Pearls are formed inside a mussel or oyster (or any mollusk with a shell) as a form of self-defense—their beauty is, amazingly, secondary to their function. When a mollusk senses that its shell has ...

A great irony of pearl history is that the least expensive cultured pearl product in the market today rivals the quality of the most expensive natural pearls ever found. The price-value anomaly is ...

The purplish shells of quahogs, treasured in the past by Native Americans, now appear alongside gold, mother-of-pearl and ...

Natural pearls form when some kind of irritant, usually a small organism, makes its way into the shell of a mollusk like an oyster or a mussel. To protect itself from the invader, the mollusk ...

A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and, sometimes, a pearl. And you thought ... a kind of mollusk that's encased in a shell made of two valves, or hinging parts.

Pearls are made by marine oysters and freshwater mussels as a natural defence against an irritant such as a parasite entering their shell or damage to their fragile body. The oyster or mussel slowly ...

What is it? Well, many of the manicures feature this ethereal, pearly, opalescent finish, a bit like the mother-of-pearl-insides of a mollusc shell. So there, I’m calling it: shell nails are ...

This taken on Nov 24, 2022 shows a Pinctada maxima shell and pearls at the scientific research trial breeding project in Changjiang Li autonomous county, South China's Hainan province. [Photo/Xinhua] ...