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June's Birthstone
“The pearl is the queen of gems and the gem of queens.”
Happy June birthdays! Your birthstone is the beautiful pearl, paired here with the delicate, lustrous Pearl Tartan.
Pearls have long inspired myths and legends. Once believed to be the tears of mermaids, they remain among the world's most treasured gems because of their beauty, soft glow, and rarity. Formed as a natural defense mechanism when an oyster surrounds a tiny grain of sand or other irritant with layers of nacre, natural pearls are remarkably uncommon—fewer than one in 10,000 wild oysters will contain one!
While white, cream, and gray are the colors most often associated with pearls, they can also appear in shades of pink, lavender, green, blue, champagne, chocolate, purple, and black. Some even display a shimmering rainbow iridescence.
Scotland has its own rich pearl tradition. Scottish pearls, often called baroque pearls, come from freshwater mussels and are known for their rounded yet irregular shapes. They have been prized since Roman times. According to the historian Suetonius, Julius Caesar admired British pearls so greatly that they were among the attractions that drew him to Britain.
Today, Scottish pearls hold a place of honor in both the Scottish and English Crown Jewels. 🤎 🤍 🖤 👑 🦪 🦪 🦪
The birthstone of June is the pearl (along with the moonstone and alexandrite).
All shelled mollusks can, by natural processes, produce some kind of "pearl" when an irritating microscopic object becomes trapped within its mantle folds, but the great majority of these "pearls" are not valued as gemstones. The prized "nacreous" pearls, are primarily produced by two groups of molluskan bivalves or clam and are made from nacre, the same living process used in the secretion of the mother of pearl which lines the shell.
The ideal pearl is perfectly round and smooth, but many other shapes, known as baroque or freshwater pearls, can occur.
The most valuable pearls occur spontaneously in the wild, but are extremely rare. These wild pearls are referred to as natural pearls.
The unique luster of pearls depends upon the reflection, refraction, and diffraction of light from the translucent layers. Pearls, both natural cultured, occur in a wide variety of colors. The most familiar colors are white and cream, but black, grey, and silver are also fairly common. The palette of pearl colors extends to every hue with the rarer pinks and lavenders occurring predominately in freshwater pearls.
Pearls were one of the attractions which drew Julius Caesar to Britain. The pearls sought were, for the most part, freshwater pearls from mussels. Pearling was banned in the U.K. in 1998 due to the endangered status of river mussels. Discovery and publicity about the sale for a substantial sum of the found Abernathy pearl from the River Tay (which has its own tartan) resulted in heavy exploitation of mussel colonies during the 1970s and 80s by amateur pearl hunters. When pearling was permitted it was carried on mainly by Scottish Travellers who found that the pearls varied from river to river, with the River Oykel in the Highlands being noted for the finest rose-pink pearls. Currently, there are only two firms in Scotland that are licensed to sell pre-1998 freshwater pearls.
By designer Carol A.L. Martin, this tartan uses shades of naturally occurring pearls.
For more fascinating facts about pearls, click the coloured strands!