With mother-of-pearl, nature has provided us with an especially beautiful material for jewelry. Its iridescent shimmer has long fascinated mankind, and artisans learned long ago to adorn precious objects with mother-of-pearl, such as inlays in beautiful furnishings made of precious woods. Various sea snails and pearl oysters form mother-of-pearl layers on the interior of their shells. In scientific terms, these coatings consist of calcium carbonate platelets. It is precisely this material that oysters use to render foreign objects such as grains of sand harmless by coating them with numerous layers of mother-of-pearl, thus transforming them into pearls.
