ျမန္မာ့ေရျပင္မွ ပုုလဲမ်ား

ပုလဲသည္ ပင္လယ္အတြင္း ေနထိုင္ေသာ ကမာ(သို႔)မုတ္ေကာင္၏ ကိုယ္တြင္းမွ ရရွိေသာ အရာျဖစ္သည္။ တြင္းထြက္ ေက်ာက္မ်က္ မဟုတ္ေပ။ ပုလဲကုိ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးတုိ႔က န၀ရတ္ကိုးပါး တြင္ ပါ၀င္ေသာ ရတနာတစ္ပါး အျဖစ္ အျမတ္တႏုိး တန္ဖုိးထား ၀တ္ဆင္ၾက ပါသည္။ န၀ရတ္ ကုိးပါးစလံုးတြင္ တစ္ခုျခင္း၌ ထူးျခားသည့္ တန္ခုိး အာနိသင္ ရွိၾက သည့္အနက္ ပုလဲ၏ အာနိသင္မွာ က်က္သေရ မဂၤလာ ရွိျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္သည္။ ပုလဲ၏ အားသာခ်က္မွာ ေက်ာက္မ်က္မ်ား ကဲ့သုိ႔ ခဲြျဖတ္ျခင္း၊ ေသြးယူျခင္းတုိ႔ ေဆာင္ရြက္ရန္ မလုိပဲ ပုလဲ ေဖာ္ယူ ၿပီးလွ်င္ ၿပီးျခင္းပင္ လွပႏွစ္လုိ ဖြယ္ရာ ေတြ႔ျမင္ရျခင္းပင္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲတြင္ သဘာဝပုလဲႏွင့္ ေမြးပုလဲဟူ၍ ႏွစ္မ်ဳိးရွိသည္။ ၿမိတ္ကၽြန္းစုတြင္ ေနထိုင္ၾကေသာ ဆလံုတိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားသည္ ပုလဲ ငုပ္၍ အသက္ေမြးၾကသည္။

ပုလဲအမ်ိဳးအစားမ်ား

ပုလဲသည္ ခရုကမာေကာင္ (Mollusks) မ်ိဳးႏြယ္မ်ားမွ ထြက္ရွိ ထုတ္လုပ္ပါသည္။ အခြံႏွစ္ခုပါေသာ ခရုကမာ ေကာင္ အမ်ိဳးေပါင္း ၈၀၀၀ ခန္႔ရွိသည့္ အနက္ အမ်ိဳး (၂၀)ခန္႔သာ ပုလဲထြက္ရွိပါသည္။ ေရခ်ိဳတြင္ ရွင္သန္ၿပီး ပုလဲ ထုတ္လုပ္ႏုိင္သည့္ ခရုကမာမ်ိဳးကုိ ဂံုးေကာင္ (Mussel) ဟု ေခၚပါသည္။ ေရငန္တြင္ ရွင္သန္ ေပါက္ဖြားၿပီး ပုလဲ ထုတ္လုပ္ ႏုိင္သည့္ ခရုကမာ ေကာင္မ်ိဳးကုိမူ မုတ္ေကာင္ (Oyster) ဟု ေခၚပါသည္။

ဂံုးေကာင္ ( Mussel )

မုတ္ေကာင္ ( Oyster )

ေရငန္ပုလဲ (၃)မ်ိဳးရွိသည့္ အနက္ ဂ်ပန္ပုလဲဟု ေခၚသည့္ အကုိယာပုလဲ Akoya Pearl မ်ားကုိ Pinctada Fucata မုတ္ေကာင္မွ ေမြးျမဴထုတ္လုပ္ၿပီး ဂ်ပန္တြင္ အမ်ားဆံုး ထုတ္လုပ္ကာ ပုလဲနက္ဟု လူသိမ်ားေသာ Tahitian Pearl မ်ားကုိ Pinctada Margaritafera မုတ္ေကာင္မွ ထုတ္လုပ္ၿပီး တေဟတီ ႏုိင္ငံတြင္ အမ်ားဆံုး ထုတ္လုပ္ပါသည္။

ေရငန္ပုလဲ အမ်ိဳးအစားမ်ား ျဖစ္သည့္ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ပုလဲ South Sea Pearl မ်ားကုိ Pinctada Maxima မုတ္ေကာင္မ်ားမွ ေမြးျမဴထုတ္လုပ္ၿပီး ၾသစေတးလ် ႏုိင္ငံတြင္ အမ်ားဆံုး ထုတ္လုပ္ပါသည္။ ယင္းမုတ္ေကာင္ မ်ိဳးသည္ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ဟု ေခၚသည့္ အေရွ႕ေတာင္ အာရွ၏ ေတာင္ဘက္ ကမ္းေျခႏွင့္ ၾသစေၾတးလ် တုိက္၏ ေျမာက္ဘက္ ကမ္းေျခ အၾကား ေရျပင္တြင္သာ ရွင္သန္ ေပါက္ဖြားပါသည္။ ထုိ႔ေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ ပုလဲကုိ ၾသစေတးလ် ႏုိင္ငံ၊ အင္ဒုိနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံ၊ ဖိလစ္ပုိင္ႏုိင္ငံႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ တုိ႔တြင္သာ ေမြးျမဴ ထုတ္လုပ္ ထြက္ရွိပါသည္။

ပုလဲျဖစ္ေပၚပံု

ပုလဲသည့္ မုတ္ေကာင္၏ ခႏၶာကုိယ္အတြင္းတြင္ ျဖစ္ေပၚၿပီး ပုလဲသားအလႊာ layers of Nacre မ်ားျဖင့္ ဖဲြ႕စည္း ထားပါသည္။ ပုလဲသားမွာ ကယ္လ္စီယမ္ ကာဘြန္နိတ္ ၉၃% ႏွင့္ က်န္ ၇% မွာ ေၾသာ္ဂဲနစ္ ျဒပ္ေပါင္းႏွင့္ ေရမ်ား ပါ၀င္ဖဲြ႕စည္း ထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲသား တစ္လႊာလွ်င္ ၀.၀၀၀၀၅ မီလီမီတာ အထူ ရွိပါသည္။ ေမြးပုလဲတစ္လံုးတြင္ ပုလဲသား အလႊာေပါင္း (၁၀၀၀) ထက္မနည္း ရွိပါသည္။ မုတ္ေကာင္မ်ားသည္ တစ္ရက္လွ်င္ ပုလဲသား အလႊာ (၃)လႊာမွ (၇)လႊာအထိ ဖံုးအုပ္ေလ့ရွိပါသည္။

ေမြးပုလဲ

ေမြးပုလဲဆုိသည္မွာ သဘာ၀ပုလဲ ျဖစ္ေပၚမႈ ျဖစ္စဥ္ကုိ လူတုိ႔က ျပဳျပင္ ဖန္တီးထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲသား၏ သိပ္သည္းျခင္းႏွင့္ တူညီေသာ ၀တ္ဆံလံုး ( Nucleus ) ကုိ ဆက္သားစ ( Mantle ) ႏွင့္ အတူ မုတ္ေကာင္၏ ခႏၶာကုိယ္ အတြင္းသုိ႔ ထည့္သြင္းေပးျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ထုိသုိ႔ ထည့္သြင္းရာတြင္ ၀တ္ဆံုလံုး အလြယ္တကူ ျပန္ထြက္ မသြားေစရန္ႏွင့္ လံုး၀န္းႀကီးမွားေသာ ပုလဲ ရရွိေစရန္ အတြက္ မုတ္ေကာင္၏ ခႏၶာ ကုိယ္အား ခြဲစိတ္၍ သတ္မွတ္ေနရာသုိ႔ ေရာက္ရွိေအာင္ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူမ်ားမွ ၀တ္ဆံ သြင္းယူရျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။ ေမြးပုလဲ တစ္လံုးတြင္ ပုလဲသား၏ အထူမွာ (၀.၄) မီလီမီတာမွ (၄.၀) မီလီမီတာ အထိ ရွိႏုိင္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲ၏ သိပ္သည္းျခင္း Density မွာ (၂.၆ မွ ၃.၀ ) အတြင္း ရွိၿပီး မာေၾကာမႈ Hardness မွာ Mohs Scale အရ (၃.၅) ရွိပါသည္။

ပထမဆံုးေသာ ေမြးပုလဲကုိ ဂ်ပန္လူမ်ိဳး မီကီမုိတုိ ဆုိသူက ၁၈၉၈ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ စတင္ ေဖာ္ယူႏုိင္ခဲ့ၿပီး ဂ်ပန္ဘုရင္ အား ဆက္သႏုိင္ခဲ့ပါသည္။ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ၿမိတ္ကၽြန္းစုတြင္ ေမြးပုလဲ ထုတ္လုပ္မႈ လုပ္ငန္းကုိ ဂ်ပန္ကုမၸဏီ တစ္ခု ျဖစ္ေသာ South Sea Pearl Company ႏွင့္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွ ေကာ့ေသာင္း ကုန္သြယ္မႈ အသင္းတုိ႔ ပူးေပါင္းကာ ၁၉၅၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွ ပထမဆံုး ေမြးပုလဲမ်ား ထြက္ရွိခဲ့ ပါသည္။

ပုလဲထိန္းသိမ္းရန္

န၀ရတ္ကုိးပါးတြင္ ပါ၀င္ေသာ ရတနာမ်ား၌ စိန္၏ မာေၾကာမႈမွာ(၁၀) ျဖစ္၍ အျမင့္ဆံုးျဖစ္ၿပီး ပုလဲ၏ မာေၾကာမႈမွာ အနိမ့္ဆံုး ျဖစ္ျခင္း တို႔ေၾကာင့္ စနစ္တက် ထိန္းသိမ္း သံုးစဲြရန္ လုိအပ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲအား အျခား ေသာ လက္၀တ္ရတနာ မ်ားနွင့္အတူ သိမ္းဆည္းျခင္းမွ ေရွာင္ၾကဥ္သင့္ပါသည္။ ေရေႏြးျဖင့္ ေဆးေၾကာျခင္ မျပဳလုပ္ရပါ။ ႏူးညံ့ၿပီး စုိစြတ္ေသာ အ၀တ္ျဖင့္ အသာအယာ ပြတ္၍ သန္႔ရွင္းေရးကုိ ပံုမွန္ ျပဳလုပ္ ေပးသင့္ ပါသည္။

ျမန္မာ့ပုလဲ လုပ္ငန္း၏ အဓိက ပုလဲေမြးျမဴေနေသာ ကၽြန္းစခန္း မ်ားမွာ -

ဒုိမယ္လ္ကၽြန္း - ပုလဲကၽြန္း ၊ ဘုတ္ျပင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္

မလိကၽြန္း - ပုေလာၿမိဳ႕နယ္

ေရႊကၽြန္းႀကီး - ေကာ့ေသာင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္

တုိ႔ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

ေဖာ္ျပပါ ပုလဲလုပ္ငန္းမ်ား၏ ပုလဲေမြးျမဴေသာ စခန္းမ်ားတြင္ ျမန္မာ့ ပညာရွင္မ်ားက ထုတ္လုပ္ ေမြးျမဴလ်က္ ရွိေသာ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ ပုလဲမ်ားသည္ ကမၻာ့ပုလဲ ေစ်းကြက္တြင္ လူႀကိဳက္မ်ားေသာ ပုလဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ အရည္အေသြး ေကာင္းမြန္ရံု သာမက ေရရွည္ခုိင္မာသည့္အတြက္ လူႀကိဳက္မ်ားၿပီး တန္ဖုိး အျမင့္မားဆံုး ပုလဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

ပုလဲတစ္လံုး၏ တန္ဖုိးကုိ ျဖစ္ေစေသာ အခ်က္မ်ား

ပုလဲတစ္လံုးအား တန္ဖုိး သတ္မွတ္ရာတြင္ ေအာက္ေဖာ္ျပပါ အခ်က္ (၇)ခ်က္ ေပၚတြင္ အေျခခံ၍ ဆံုးျဖတ္ ရပါသည္။

၁။ ပြင့္ရည္ (အရည္အေသြး ) LUSTRE ။ ျပင္ပမွ အလင္းေရာင္သည္ ပုလဲသား အလႊာပါးေလးမ်ား အတြင္းသုိ႔ ထုိးေဖာက္ ၀င္ေရာက္ ရုိက္ခတ္၍ အလင္းျပန္ျခင္း ျဖင့္ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုး၏ ေတာက္ပမႈ အလင္း ျဖစ္ေပၚ ေစျခင္းအား ပြင့္ရည္ဟု ေခၚပါသည္။ တန္ဖုိး သတ္မွတ္ရာတြင္ အေျခခံရသည့္ အခ်က္မ်ား အားလံုးတြင္ ပြင့္ရည္သည္ အေရးႀကီးဆံုး ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပြင့္ရည္ မရွိေသာ ပုလဲ မ်ားသည္ ထြန္းလင္း ေတာက္ပမႈ မရွိဘဲ အေရာင္မွိန္ေနပါသည္။

၂။ ပုလဲ မ်က္ႏွာျပင္ ေခ်ာေမြ႔ ေျပျပစ္မႈ SURFACE QUALITY ။ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုးႏွင့္ တစ္လံုးမွာ မ်က္ႏွာျပင္၏ အေနအထားေပၚတြင္ မူတည္၍ အရည္အေသးအားျဖင့္ မတူညီႏုိင္ပါ။ အနာအဆာ ကင္းေသာ ပုလဲမ်ားသည္ ရွားပါးမႈေၾကာင့္ အေကာင္းဆံုးဟု သတ္မွတ္ခံရၿပီး တန္ဖုိးအားျဖင့္ ေစ်းအလြန္ႀကီးပါသည္။ ေမြးပုလဲမ်ားသည္ သက္ရွိ သတၱ၀ါမွ ထုတ္လုပ္ရျခင္း ျဖစ္၍ အနာအဆာ တစ္မ်ိဳးမ်ိဳး ရွိေနတတ္ပါသည္။ စက္ရံုမွ ထုတ္လုပ္ သကဲ့သုိ႔ စင္းလံုးေခ်ာမရႏုိင္ပါ။ ထုိအခ်က္သည္ပင္လွ်င္ သဘာ၀၏ ထိေတြ႔မႈ ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုးႏွင့္ တစ္လံုး ရာႏႈန္းျပည့္ မတူညီႏုိင္သျဖင့္ ပုလဲကုိ ျမတ္ႏုိးသူမ်ား တန္ဖုိးထားစရာ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

၃။ ပုလဲသား အလႊာ၏ အထူအပါး NACRE QUALITY ။ ပုလဲသား အလႊာထုသည္ ပြင့္ရည္ LUSTRE ျဖစ္ ေပၚေစရန္ အေျခခံက်သည့္ အခ်က္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲသား အလႊာ ထူပါးျခင္းသည္ ပုလဲ၏ အရည္အေသြးကုိ ဆံုးျဖတ္ႏုိင္ရန္ အေထာက္အကူ ျပဳပါသည္။ ပုိမုိေတာက္ပေသာ ပုလဲ အမ်ားစုမွာ ပုလဲသားလႊာ ထူထဲမႈ ရွိၿပီး ပုလဲသားလႊာ ပါးေနပါက အေရာင္မွာ မွိန္ၿပီး ျဖဴေသာ အေရာင္အဆင္း ရွိေနပါသည္။ ပုလဲသားလႊာ ပါးေနပါက ပုလဲ၏ တန္ဖုိး က်ဆင္းႏုိင္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲသားလႊာ ထူမွသာ ရာစုႏွစ္မ်ားစြာ ခုိင္ခံ့ေနၿပီး ဆဲြေဆာင္မႈ ရွိသည့္ အသြင္အျပင္ကုိလည္း ထိန္းထား ႏုိင္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲသားလႊာ ထူသည့္ ပုလဲတုိင္းသည္ တူညီေသာ ပြင့္ရည္ မရွိႏုိင္ပါ။ ပုလဲသားလႊာမ်ား အတြင္း အလင္းေဖာက္ထြင္း ၀င္ေရာက္ႏုိင္မႈႏွင့္ ပုလဲသား အလႊာ အထပ္ေလးမ်ား အစီအစဥ္ က်နစြာ တည္ရွိေနမႈတုိ႔ေပၚ မူတည္၍ ပြင့္ရည္ မတူညီမႈကုိ ျဖစ္ေစပါသည္။

၄။ အရြယ္အစား SIZE ။ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ ပုလဲမ်ားသည္ အရြယ္အစား ႀကီးေသာ ပုလဲမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပုလဲတစ္လံုးသည္ သူ႔အမ်ိဳးအစားႏွင့္ သူ ရွိရမည့္ အရြယ္ထက္ ပုိမို ႀကီးမားေနမည္ ဆုိပါက ထုိပုလဲ၏ မက္ေမာဖြယ္ ေကာင္းေသာ ရွားပါးသည့္ အရည္အေသြး ( Rarity ) ေၾကာင့္ အမ်ိဳးတူ ပုလဲမ်ားထက္ တန္ဖိုး အားျဖင့္ ပုိမုိ ျမင့္မားလာမည္ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

၅။ ပံုသဏၭာန္ SHAPE ။ ပုလဲ၏ ပံုသဏၭာန္ အေပၚ မူတည္၍လည္း တန္ဖုိးကုိ ဆံုးျဖတ္ပါသည္။ လံုး၀န္းေသာ ပုလဲမ်ားသည္ တန္ဖုိး အျမင့္ဆံုး ရရွိႏုိင္ပါသည္။

၆။ အေရာင္ COLOUR ။ ေတာင္ပင္လယ္ ပုလဲ၏ အေျခခံအေရာင္အျဖစ္ ေငြေရာင္ႏွင့္ ေရႊေရာင္ဟု ႏွစ္ေရာင္သတ္မွတ္ပါသည္။ အေျခခံအေရာင္ေပၚတြင္ ထပ္မံစုိးမုိးၿပီး ေရာယွက္ျဖစ္ေပၚေနေသာ အေရာင္ကဲြ မ်ားမွာ ပန္းေရာင္၊ ေရႊအုိေရာင္၊ ေရႊ၀ါေရာင္ႏွင့္ ႏုိ႔ႏွစ္ေရာင္တုိ႔ ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သက္တန္႔ ေရာင္စဥ္ကဲ့သုိ႔ မ်က္ႏွာျပင္တြင္ ေရာင္စံု ျဖာထြက္ေနေသာ ပုလဲမ်ားသည္ ေစ်းအျမင့္ဆံုး ရေစသည္။

၇။ တူညီ လုိက္ဖက္မႈ MATCHING ။ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုးႏွင့္ တစ္လံုး တိက်စြာ တူညီႏုိင္ျခင္း မရွိပါ။ တူညီ လုိက္ဖက္မႈသည္ လည္ဆဲြ သြယ္တန္းရာတြင္ လည္းေကာင္း၊ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုးထက္ ပုိမုိေသာ လက္၀တ္ ရတနာ မ်ား စီျခယ္ရာတြင္ လည္းေကာင္း၊ အေထာက္အကူ ျပဳသည္။ တူညီ လုိက္ဖက္မႈ ရွိသည့္ ပုလဲ တစ္လံုးစီကုိ ညီမွ်ေသာ အက်ိဳး ေက်းဇူး ျဖစ္ေပၚ လာေအာင္ ဖန္တီး ယူႏုိင္မည္ ဆုိလွ်င္ ထုိကဲ့သုိ႔ တူညီ လုိက္ဖက္မႈကုိ MATCHING ဟု ေခၚပါသည္။

ပုလဲ မ်ိဳး ၈-ပါး

ဟတၳိကုမၻံ- ဆင္ဦးကင္း၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ ေရႊေရာင္အဆင္း၊

၀ရာဟဒါဌံ- ၀က္စြယ္၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ ၀က္စြယ္အဆင္း၊

ဘူဇဂၤ သီသံ- ေျမြဦးေခါင္း၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ စိမ္းညိဳေတာက္ပသည္၊

၀လာဟကံ- တိမ္တိုက္၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ နတ္သံုး ရတနာမ်ိဳး၊ အလြန္လင္း၏၊

သေခၤါ- ခ႐ုသင္း၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ ၎င္း အဆင္းေရာင္ရွိ၏၊

သိပၸိ- ေယာက္သြား၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ အဆင္းေရာင္အထူးထူးရွိ၏၊

ေ၀ဠဳ- ၀ါး၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ သပ်စ္သီးစိမ္းေရာင္အဆင္းရွိ၏၊

မစၦ သိေရာ- ငါးဦးေခါင္း၌ျဖစ္ေသာ ပုလဲ၊ ငါးဖယ္ေက်ာက္ကုန္း အဆင္းရွိ၏၊

ဣတိ-ဤသို႔ဆိုတိုင္း၊ မုတၱ ေယာနိေယာ-ပုလဲမ်ိဳးတို႔သည္၊ အ႒-ရွစ္မ်ိဳးရွိကုန္၏။

Qualities of Myanmar South Sea Pearl Without our pearl's unique quality we would not be able to establish an international reputation in pearling business. The first and foremost quality of Myanmar South Sea pearl is lustre. Superbly lustrous pearls are unbeatable. Luster is the best expression of a pearl's beauty. Luster does not simply means a shiny surface: it implies the structural beauty of nacre. As in all things, true beauty is lit from within, so the one virtue above all others in a pearl is lustre. This is the deep inner glow, which shimmers like moonlight upon the deep blue sea and gives the pearl its luminescence. The lustre of our pearl comes from inside, not from upper surface. If you compare our pearl with SSPs from other countries, you can easily distinguish the superior lustre. It is not necessary to treat or bleach or dye our pearls to get excellent lustre. We sell it as it comes out from the oyster. Surface quality is very important for a pearl. But, please be advised that the most beautiful and valuable pearls may still have slight imperfections. These appear in the form of small pits or dimples. Obviously, deep and serious surface blemishes should be avoided. But a pearl with a surface that is only slightly spotted, (touches of nature, by the way) should not distract you especially when you are charmed by the lustre. The peculiarity of our pearls is possessing cleaner surface than the others. Nacre thickness is essential for a gem quality pearl. Out of three spherical pearls, South Sea pearls are famous for its thickness of nacre. Thick nacre coating helps keep its natural colour, lustre and beauty, and allows it to be worn with pride from generation to generation. Our pearls are famous for its sliver-pink colour. A gem quality pearl might possess a beautiful optical effect called orient (rainbow hues glistening across its surface). Those hues seem to move when the pearl is turned. Orient is like the shifting rainbow of colours you see on soap bubbles. You can see orient on our silver pearl as well as golden pearl. In Myanmar waters most of the oysters are gold-lipped and some are silver-lipped so that we produce silver-pinkish pearl as well as deep golden pearl. Our South Sea pearl comes in a wide variety of colours. You can get silver-white to deep gold, including pink, cream, champagne, yellow, green and blue. Our golden pearls are very famous in international market. You can get a hundred percent genuine natural colour golden pearls at our emporiums. Shape is one of the value factors of the pearl. Generally speaking, round is the most valuable pearl shape. This shape is prized partly because fine quality round pearls are relatively rare. Collecting enough large round cultured pearls of exceptionally high quality to assemble a fine strand might take years. Men always try to produce round pearl but oyster doesn't. For seeding, the operator always inserts a mother-of-pearl bead that is spherical. Yet only a small percentage of harvested pearls are perfectly round. A significant quantity will come in various shapes including near-round, oval, drop, button, circle and baroque. This variety of shapes combined with the virtually unlimited range of natural colours make our South Sea pearl an incredibly attractive gem. Consumers have the option of acquiring a one-of-a-kind pearl which becomes their exclusive possession alone , and designers are presented with a window of unrestricted creativity in the designing of rings, pendants, earrings, brooches and pins. A pearl's ultimate size can depend on several variables __ the size and health of the oyster that produced it, the size of the nucleus, and the duration of time the oyster spent under water adding layers of nacre to build the pearl. Other factors include the climate and nutrient conditions of the environment. As with other gems, a larger pearl is typically more valuable. The larger the pearl, the rarer it tends to be, and the more it costs. We are producing 12 to 17 mm pearls.

Categories of Spherical Pearl

Pearls are the only gem produced biologically rather than through geophysical processes. Unlike diamonds or other precious stones, pearls does not require cutting or working to reveal their beauty, because they are complete in the form in which they emerge from the oysters.

Principally there are two kinds of pearls, natural pearl and cultured pearl. `Natural Pearl are the result of misplaced nacre-producing mantle cells. The only cells that can produce nacre are those of the outermost skin of the mantle, which lies against the shell. These cells are probably captured inadvertently by some kind of foreign body (such as a small stone, a piece of shell, grain of sand, or even a parasite) when penetrating the mantle tissue. The cells are able to reproduce themselves and surround the intruding object while the nacre continue to coat it, forming a pearl. Natural pearls are so rare that thousands of oysters might have to be opened in order to reveal a single pearl and even then the pearl is likely to be tiny, misshapen and practically worthless. Cultured Pearls are the fruit of a close co-operation between their mother oysters, Nature and Man.

Cultured pearls are almost identical to natural ones except that a person has activated the process byproviding a bead and a graft tissue to form a pearl. In 1898 the first cultured pearls were harvested in Japan. But those of the early harvests were not easy to market. Only between 1916 and 1919 beautifully rounded cultured pearls became commercially available for the first time. Those were Akoya cultured pearls. Today, almost all of the pearls sold in the market are cultured pearls. Here are two main types of cultured pearls, freshwater cultured pearl and seawater cultured pearl.

Freshwater cultured pearls are cultivated in freshwater molluscs occurring in places such as the Huazhong region in China (along the bank of Yangtse ), and Japan�s Lake Biwa. The main producer of freshwater pearl is China and over 1,000 tons of Chinese freshwater pearls are coming into the market annually. Freshwater pearls generally have a lower proportion of organic material in their nacre than pearls from marine pearl oysters. This gives freshwater pearls a glassy lustre. They are the cheapest pearls available and look attractive.

Akoya pearls come from the Akoya pearl oysters ( Pinctada fucata), which are found in the waters around Japan. They are sometimes called �Japanese pearls�, but now a large amount of Akoya pearls are being produced in China as well. The pearl bearing oysters are small and the pearls cultivated from those oysters are small accordingly. Up until now, they range from 2mm to 9mm or, very rarely, 10mm in size. The annual production of Akoya pearls is huge, around 100 tons each year. The culturing period is short, about 9 months and nacre coating is much thinner than South Sea pearls. The real advantage of Akoya pearls is their affordability. A necklace can be purchased for a few hundred dollar, rather than the many thousand of dollars needed for a South Sea strand. Japanese tried to produce bigger pearl from larger oyster, and the first huge pearls were harvested, in 1928, at Buton in Indonesia. To everyone�s amazement those pearls were 8mm to 10mm in size and had thick nacreous coating. At that time Akoya pearl�s size range was between 3mm and 4mm.

Above- mentioned large-sized pearls are called South Sea pearls, which come from silver-lipped and gold-lipped pearl oyster Pinctada maxima. This oyster is one of the largest of the thirty or so species of pearl oysters found throughout the world. Its shell can grow to a diameter of 25cm to 35cm, and it can weigh up to 5kg. The natural habitats of those big pearl oyster are in warm tropical South Pacific sea waters of the Arafura Sea off Australia�s north west coast, Indonesia Archipelago, Philippine Archipelago and Myeik (Mergui) Archipelago of Myanmar. World War Two obliterated all South Sea Pearl cultivations.

Then in 1957 the sensational South Sea pearls were harvested again in Myanmar waters. The sizes were from 9mm to 17mm. The South Sea pearl is a noble pearl and tends to have very strong and healthy nacreous coating around the implanted mother-of-pearl nucleus. It is this thick coating that helps keep its natural colour, lustre and beauty, and allows it to be worn with pride from generation to generation. In 1960s, 1970s and 1980s gem quality Myanmar South Sea pearls were very famous in the pearling market and buyers from all over the world visited Myanmar Gems, Jade and Pearl Emporium and bought competitively. Nowadays Australia is the main producer of South Sea Pearl. Indonesia, Philippine and Myanmar also produced South Sea Pearl. Annual production of Silver and Gold south sea pearl is about 5 tons.

Another kind of large pearl is Black South Sea pearl produced from black-lipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera whose habitat is the south Pacific. This oyster is slightly smaller than Pinctada maxima, growing to a diameter of 12cm to 15cm, with the largest sometimes exceeding 20cm. The pearls it produces are usually 8mm to 15mm in diameter. The main cultivation areas are the beautiful islands and atolls surrounding Tahiti in French Polynesia where cultivation started in the early 1960s. The first harvest of over 1,000 pearls was in 1965.

There are three foreign companies, one from Japan, one from Australia and one from Thailand. The earliest one Myanmar Tasaki Company has finished first commercial scale harvest in 2001.Since then the company has been producing finest quality pearls annually. Myanmar Tasaki company specializes to produce pinkish silver colour pearls. The pearl sizes are from 9 to 17 millimetres. The second one, Myanmar Atlantic company has conducted first commercial scale harvest in 2003.The company is also producing finest quality pearls every year. Myanmar Atlantic company specializes to produce deep gold pearls. The local joint venture company, the Orient Pearl has harvested over 20000 pieces of pearls from the hatchery bred oysters in August,2005.The colours of the pearls included about 20% deep gold and 20% silver pink. There are four hatcheries in Myanmar. Now, ninety percent of the production is from hatchery bred oysters. In farming, latest know-how and unpolluted water incorporating with strong healthy Myanmar Pinctada maxima oysters, we are producing historically famous Myanmar South Sea pearls. In marketing, foreign buyers are welcome to visit and buy pearl at reasonable prices, whole year round.

Ref:www.myanmarpeal.com