Natural pearls are an extremely difficult kind of pearl to come by nowadays. You have to slaughter thousands of pearl oysters in order to find just one Good quality natural pearl. In the best pearl beds inside the Gulf of California the incidence of natural pearls was said to be in the range of 5 to 12%, meaning that for every 100 killed oysters you would only find some 5 to 12 pearls. But, you would have to consider yet another factor into the equation: of those pearls only a 30% would be of really good quality. So, out of those possible 12 pearls, only 3.6 good pearls could be obtained. To satiate the world's demand for pearls an intensive world-wide fishing effort was done, and it had its adverse results on the viability of most of the natural pearl oyster populations throughout our planet, most becoming exhausted beyond help.

Natural pearls are formed when the pearl oyster forms something called a pearl sac. This pearl sac is the result of external stimuli (a parasite -mostly polychaete worms- or other drilling menaces, such as the drill mussel Teredo) upon the nacre producing cells of the oyster's mantle. This pearl sac engulfs the foreign body, and starts depositing thousands of very thin layers of nacre over it, encapsulating it to protect the oyster. After some years (3 or more), a Natural pearl of good size (4-12 mm) could be found inside an oyster. Natural pearls are -sometimes- worth around 10 times more than their cultured pearl equivalent.

Due to their natural origin, natural pearls have many shapes: baroque or odd-shaped, drops, ovals, buttons and -very rarely- round. Natural pearls are not caused by Human interference, but at our Guaymas based farm we harvest between 8 to 14 high quality pearls every year. These pearls are naturally occurring (our farm's site was once a natural pearl bed) within our farm-raised Rainbow Lipped Pearl Oysters.

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