Gem Profile 23: Scallop Pearl:  
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    SCALLOP PEARL:   Baja Beauty

         Somewhere in Korea-maybe in a glass case, maybe in a vault- sits the most beautiful scallop pearl that natural pearl dealer Wes Rankin of Pacific Coast Pearls, Petaluma, California, has ever seen. It’s an 18 carat oval with a nutmeg-orange color like you sometimes see on the colorful shells of the bivalve mollusk that grows these pearls. This glory went to an Asian collector shortly after Rankin asked for time to chew on its hard-to-swallow price of nearly $2,000 per carat early this year. “When I called back three hours later, the pearl had been shipped,” he says of the costliest hesitation of his career.

     Since first offering scallop pearls at the Tucson show in February 2000, Rankin estimates he has sold, on average, 100 of them a year. All were bought from divers who had collected them as curiosities or in the hope that they would one day find as avid an audience as the abalone pearl. Now that audience has emerged and there are nowhere near enough goods to feed its growing appetite.

     Scallop pearls are probably the rarest of all natural pearls. I have never seen one used in a piece of jewelry, although the magnificent shells they come from are occasionally used for jewelry design. Two years ago, Departures featured a paprika-orange scallop shell pin, accented with turquoise and 18k gold, made by Cartier in 1958, retailing on Madison Avenue for $28,000. Imagine what a pearl from this shell would have looked like.

     In any case, given the legendary beauty of the scallop shell, it is surprising to learn that only one of the four specialists in natural pearls contacted for this article, K.C. Bell in San Francisco, had ever seen a scallop pearl before the tail end of the 1990’s. As far as natural pearl veteran Gina Latendresse of American Pearl Company in Nashville, Tennessee, is concerned, they’re like a newly discovered pearl variety.

     The question remains: Why did it take America’s small community of natural pearl dealers so long to take notice of the scallop pearl? The answer is simple: there was no need to.

     The sudden resurgence of natural pearls is the biggest breaking news in the pearl world. Demand for these treasures in Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Europe, and, lately, America is so strong this left-for-dead market is staging a revival that verges on a resurrection. Dealers, designers, manufacturers, jewelers, and collectors who watched the values of South Sea and Tahitian pearls slide far from the record high prices they commanded in the early 1990’s are taking refuge in natural pearls. The stampede started with conch pearls and has moved with flash-fire quickness to Oriental, natural black, American freshwater, abalone and, now, scallop pearls.

     If this comeback comes as news to you, you’re not alone. The natural pearl market has been ignored for decades. Quite frankly, there was no need to pay it any attention. The cultured pearl market was providing enough investment gems to keep collectors happy. Starting in the 1950’s, Burma supplied white and golden cultured pearls as rare and coveted as its rubies. Then, in the late 1970’s, Tahiti bowed on the world stage with its magnificent farm-raised aubergine and neon-green pearls. Last, Australia began producing pearls that vied with Burma’s for beauty.

     All in all, the cultured pearl market could be counted on to meet needs for connoisseur pearl. But as South Sea and Tahitian pearl production mushroomed and prices fell, collectors turned back to pearls that were gathered, not grown. “It’s like we’ve gone back to another era,” says Latendresse.

 WEST COAST WONDERS

     Scallop pearls come from a breed of bivalve mollusk named the Mano de Leon, which is Spanish for “lion’s paw.” This breed of scallop, classified as Nodipecten sudnodosus, is found, says Paula Mikkelsen of the American Museum of Natural History, in Mexico’s inland Sea of Cortez as well as the Pacific side of its Baja coast. Unlike the conch, which is rapidly approaching endangered species status, the lion’s paw scallop is plentiful and unthreatened. But too few of them produce pearls, probably less than one in 10,000.

     For the most part, explains Jeremy Norris of Oasis Pearl, Albion, California, scallop pearls are symmetrical, frequently found in round, drop, oval, and button shapes. Colors range from white to brown to orange with pearls frequently exhibiting a handsome deep brownish-purplish hue. Occasionally, pearls boast coveted spice-rack colors-everything from saffron yellow to tumeric orange to chili-powder reddish-brown-but these are extremely rare. Some larger pearls, usually ones with baroque shapes, have colors that graduate from light to dark or are marbled. All in all, most scallop pearls have deep tones.

     Like the conch and melo pearls, the scallop pearl is classified as “porcelaneous” rather than “nacreous”. Some even seem to have the frame structure for which the Caribbean conch is famous. Most have what appears like a mosaic, or mottling, of light and dark colors, an optical phenomenon, explains Neil Landman, curator of the American Museum of Natural History’s pearl exhibition in 2001, caused by light reflections and refractions from tiny crystal-like needles distributed at angles to one another. As for price, the range is wide but still affordable: $100 to $2,000 per carat.

       
Modern Jeweler, April 2004 
By David Federman
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