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dreadfutures · 4 months

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oh there are lab grown pearls but i thought it meant the pearls are grown without a mollusk :^(

There are pearls you can get without an animal involved, fortunately! And some are still good quality! But they're still not lab grown, and I'm being pedantic because the reason we can't make fully synthetic pearls is pretty cool actually!

Fake pearls are not *grown* at all, and not made in labs the way some gemstones are. As a shorthand, some companies call them lab grown, but they are always "manufactured pearls" or "imitation pearls." They're mass produced in factories out of other materials.

Lab grown gemstones are really really cool, but this isn't that process, and no lab is involved. In theory, you could take the materials a pearl is made out of and coax it into growing...something. But that mineral would end up being crystalline (trying to grow it slowly into its natural form) or flat (trying to grow it in deposited layers).

The cool thing about pearls is that they get their shape, lustre, and physical properties from the way the calcium carbonate is layered up in a sphere from around the initial nucleation site! Even their unique colors have to do with the microstructures and what's incorporated into the material as it grows. It's so far completely impossible to make them synthetically. You *have* to use a natural material (mollusk shell) or fake it (glass, plastic).

SEM images at different angles of observation on a cultured pearl curved surface region showing aragonite mesolayers and polygonal tile edges. Magnification markers are 4 and 2 microns, respectively. Murr, L.E., Ramirez, D.A. The Microstructure of the Cultured Freshwater Pearl. JOM 64, 469–474 (2012).

We haven't spent as much time trying to come up with a way to lab-grow (genuinely grow) pearls. They don't have as many uses as, say, sapphire (which we lab grow a lot, perfectly!). BUT.

A LOT of research has been done on another cool thing about bivalves...

Muscle foot glue! There are a ton of applications and inspiration we can use muscle foot protein for, like using this glue instead of stitches or rods for shoulder surgeries, or for underwater adhesive applications for structures, boats, pipes, etc.

Bivalves have a lot of their coastal territories in danger because of climate change and development. They clean water and actively sequester carbon and they're super super high in protein so they are all around super cool creatures that don't get enough love!

#pearls #gemstones #pearl is my birth stone and i am a materials scientist so i have read so much about pearls #mimicking natural materials is a whole field it's super cool!!#we're not there yet tho #the muscle article is about just one group's work but hundreds of groups are working on it?#its so cool???!#anyway now my weird bivalve interest is public

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