The ugly history of beautiful thing. Pearls.

There was once upon a time a very old woman, who lived with her flock of geese in a waste place among the mountains, and there had a little house,” begins The Goose Girl at the Well. Published by the Brothers Grimm, this strange little story describes a princess who comes to live with a poor crone in that wretched waste place after she fails her father’s Lear-like test to profess her love and devotion. The girl is lovely, as befits a fairy-tale princess — “white as snow, as rosy as apple-blossom, and her hair as radiant as sun-beams” — but there is one detail that always snags in my mind: “When she cried, not tears fell from her eyes, but pearls and jewels only.” The rest of the story is a bit boring, I’m sorry to say. The girl returns home, the king learns his folly, and the old woman disappears into thin air, taking only the precious stones that fell from the girl’s magical tear ducts. But it ends on a funny note: This much is certain, that the old woman was no witch, as people thought, but a wise woman who meant well. Very likely it was she who, at the princess’s birth, gave her the gift of weeping pearls instead of tears. That does not happen now-a-days, or else the poor would soon become rich. I wish Grimm’s narrator had lived to see our world, one where pearls are so inexpensive that almost anyone can own a pearl necklace or a set of earrings. These gemstones are no longer precious, and they come neither from red-rimmed eyes nor from secret caverns in the ocean, but from underwater baskets strung together on sprawling sea-farms. Pearls were once mystical objects, believed by some to be the tears of Eve, by others to be the tears of Aphrodite. There are stories of pearls falling out of women’s mouths when they utter sweet words, and pearls appearing from the spray of sea foam as a goddess is born. Now we know better: pearls are made from some of the basic and common building blocks of nature — calcium, carbon, oxygen, arranged into calcium carbonate particles, bund together by organic proteins. They are created out of animal pain, which has been sublimated into something iridescent and smooth, layered and lovely. Born of irritation, these gemstones can be mass-produced and purchased with the click of a button. These gems, like so many things, have lost some of their luster thanks to the everyday degradation of value that comes with globalization and 24/7 access to consumer goods. Thanks to Amazon, you no longer need to plumb the depths of a river or visit a jeweler to purchase a set of freshwater pearl drops. With one-click ordering, you can have a pair of dangling ivory orbs delivered to your house within days — in some places, hours.. And yet: imagine opening an oyster and seeing that slimy amorphous lump of muscle, and nestled among it, a single pearl. The fact that such iridescent, shape-shifting beauty can come from a mucus-y mollusk remains something of a miracle, primal evidence that the world orients itself toward beauty. Or so I want to believe. * * * Most mollusks can make a pearl under the right conditions. A mollusk is an invertebrate that has an unsegmented, squishy body enclosed by a membrane called a mantle. These strange aquatic creatures date back more than 540 million years. Homo sapiens arrived on the scene 300,000 years ago, making mollusks hundreds of millions of years older than people. The word mollusk comes from the Latin for “soft,” because they are; even the more defined mollusks like octopuses and squid have a floppy fluidity. As a phylum, Mollusca is a huge group that includes 23% of all marine organisms, including snails, slugs, clams, oysters, mussels, cuttlefish, octopus, squid, chitons, sea hares, and sea butterflies. As incredible as it sounds, squid and octopuses can both produce pearl-like growths (more specifically, calcareous concretions), but not all mollusk-made lumps are shiny and pretty. Many pearls look like rocks — dull pebbles, animal waste products with no greater value. To create an iridescent pearl, the organism must be able to secrete nacre, a calcium carbonate substance that hardens over time. A small particle of foo, or a little piece of silt or sand lodges inside their shell, and the mollusk slowly coats the irritant with layer after layer of nacre. Some mollusks, including abalone and mussels, line the interior of their entire shell in nacre, creating gorgeous mother-of-pearl whose shimmering shades of blue, green, and purple dance like the Northern Lights. The fact that such iridescent, shape-shifting beauty can come from a mucus-y mollusk remains something of a miracle, primal evidence that the world orients itself toward beauty. Or so I want to believe. Nacre is surprisingly durable and hard: even though it’s composed of 95% aragonite (calcium carbonite), the arrangement of its molecules makes it 3,000 times less likely to fracture. They don’t lie in flat layers, but rather interlock, with elastic biopolymers (like chitin) acting as the organic mortar between aragonite bricks, explains Robin Lloyd in a 2004 article for LiveScience. Predictably, this incredible natural phenomenon has been hailed as a great discovery for the military. “Abalone shell cannot stop an AK-47 bullet,” writes Lloyd, but scientists are hopeful that further study of the abalone could lead to the development of lightweight and effective body armor for “soldiers, police, spies, and others.” While ancient humans did make weapons from seashells, our earliest stories about pearls are not so bellicose. Impossibly hard and supernaturally gleaming, pearls were viewed as feminine, treasures born of a goddess. It’s easy to understand this visual connection; clam is not the most unexpected slang term for a vagina. (This association lives on today with Goddess Vaginal Detox Pearls, a newfangled form of douching that advertises an ability to make your downstairs region “super fleeky.”) This may have contributed to the pearl’s reputation as a philter, or love potion. According to The Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs, pearls are a symbol of love thanks to their association with Aphrodite and Venus, the Greek, and Roman goddesses of love, respectively. The authors note that, “Venus herself is also called pearl or pearl of the sea, and her pubic hair is called pearl gate. In the treasury of Aphrodite’s temple, people hoarded pearls.” In The Encyclopedia of Superstitions, author Richard Webster adds that pearls have been used historically to help couples conceive. Would-be parents can give sperm a boost by placing a pearl under the woman’s pillow while they do the deed. But perhaps the most famous legend about this animal-made gemstone comes from ancient Egypt. Pearls were all the rage in ancient Egypt and Rome, and many of the wealthiest women in society wore them to demonstrate their wealth and status. But even the most pearl-encrusted gown couldn’t compete with Cleopatra’s epic flex: one night, at dinner, the queen took off one of her massive pearl earrings, dropped it in a glass of strong vinegar, and downed the dissolved mineral mixture in one shot. This long-disputed tale comes to us from Pliny. According to the historian, Cleopatra drank the pearl to win a bet with Mark Antony. Translated by Berthold L. Ullman, the cheeky story is worth quoting in its entirety: The last of the Egyptian queens owned the two largest pearls of all time, left to her by oriental kings. When Antony was stuffing himself daily with rare foods, she proudly and impertinently, like the royal harlot that she was, sneered at his attempts at luxury and extravagance. When he asked her what could be added in the way of sumptuousness she replied that she would use up 10,000,000 sesterces at one dinner. Antony was eager to learn about it but didn’t think it could be done. So they made a bet, and on the next day when the bet was to be decided, she set before Antony a dinner that under other circumstances would have been a magnificent one but was an everyday affair for Antony. She did this so that the day should not be entirely wasted. Antony laughed at her and asked for the reckoning. But she said that this was merely a preliminary and assured him that the real banquet would use up the estimated sum and that she would consume the half-million dollar dinner all by herself. Then she ordered the dessert to be served. According to instructions, the servants placed but one dish before her, containing vinegar whose acidity and strength dissolves pearls into slush. She was at the time wearing in her ears that remarkable and truly unique work of nature known as pearls. So while Antony was wondering what in the world she was going to do, she took one pearl from her ear, plunged it into the vinegar, and when it was dissolved, swallowed it. Lucius Plancus, who was refereeing the bet, put his hand on the other pearl as she was preparing to dissolve it in like manner and declared Antony the loser. Ullman estimates that this event may have taken place between 34 and 32 B.C.E., just a two decades after Julius Caesar invaded Britain, a military action that was purportedly driven in part by Caesar’s love for pearls and the island country’s abundance of freshwater gems. The pearl mania of ancient Rome would reach its peak in the first century C.E., and at the height of the craze, legend has it that Caligula went so far as to make his favorite horse a consul, then topped off the insult by draping the equine in a pearl necklace. (This may just be one of the many myths about the debaucherous ruler; it’s hard to know for sure.) Pearls aren’t just associated with sex and money, but with excess. At Art Journal, Peter Tomory describes how Cleopatra became known as the “epitome of Luxuria, that medieval vice pictured as a bejeweled naked woman.” Representations of Cleopatra in medieval and Renaissance art used the pearl to inform viewers that they weren’t gazing at any bare-breasted noble, but rather the personification of a deadly sin. Before “lust” was one of the sins, it was called luxuria. Luxuria was about more than just sexual desire. It wasn’t just wanting. Luxuria was a glut of libido. Sometimes, this sin was shown as a “profane type of Aphrodite,” which is one interpretation of Pisanello’s drawing of a reclining nude figure. Piero di Cosimo’s painting of Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra is less overtly erotic, but the snake winding around her collar do call to mind another famous temptress — Eve. For these artists, and for their medieval audience, luxuria was a sin greater than your everyday sexual urges. Luxuria was erotic, shameful, dangerous, and dark. I’ve always thought of pearls as stuffy jewels, prim and proper and above all, preppy. But that’s one of the most fascinating things about the pearl — it’s a Janus symbol. Like Janus words, which mean one thing and its opposite (like cleave, which can mean both to adhere or separate, or my personal favorite, skin), the pearl can stand for both Madonna and whore, smutty sex and pious purity. There is an entire chapter in People and Pearls, titled “Innocents,” which documents the various ways that pearls have been used to celebrate milestones in a girl’s life, from birth, baptism, first communion, or bat mitzvah, all the way up to the final one: betrothal. “Pearl’s aqueous origins offer a logical association with cleansings,” write Ki Hackney and Diana Edkins. Queen Elizabeth I, the famous “Virgin Queen,” was often depicted wearing strings of pearls. She wore pearl earrings and pearls in her hair. Her dresses had pearl buttons and there were pearls sewn into the trim. In addition to signifying her chastity, these pearls also called to mind the moon — another luminous orb. Moon goddesses, like Cynthia and Diana, were known to be fierce, chaste, and dedicated — all qualities that the ruler hoped to embody.