Magpie Diaries

Latest Entry  ·  18 March 2026

From Pearls to St. Pancras

For as long as I can remember I’ve had a Mother of Pearl fish like this swimming around in my various boxes; I didn’t know what it was or where it came from and then when I came across it the other day I decided to try and find out. It turns out it’s a Chinese gaming chip, and the search for information about this lead me to reading more about Mother of Pearl in general. Mother of Pearl – or nacre (pronounced NAY-ker) is the iridescent lining of certain mollusks, like pearl oysters, fresh water mussels, abalone, turban snails and large top snails, mainly. These clever little creatures create nacre to protect their soft flesh from parasites and debris that would damage them, ultimately forming a pearl. It is generally thought that it’s a grain of sand in the shell that causes this process but in fact sand seldom gets into a mollusk shell and can quite easily be expelled, whereas little parasites or bits of shell or other organic matter are harder to expell so the mollusk protects itself from the intruder. Nearly all pearls now are cultured pearls, and this is done by inserting a little bead into the mollusk which then creates a pearl around it. There’s no guarantee that the pearl will grow into a saleable gem, but lining of the shell - mother of pearl - is a naturally occurring event in all these types of shells which makes it more abundant and therefore a lot cheaper than pearls.
 It came as a surprise to archaeologists when they discovered Mother Of Pearl had been used extensively in decorating the interior of Roman villas in Spain because this had not been found in other excavations. Mother of Pearl is very strong but is easy to cut and carve which makes it a wonderful material to work with in all things decorative. The Egyptians used it in their highly prized silver work, decorating spoons and plates with it; during the Chinese Ming dynasty nacre was used extensively, mostly for wonderfully elaborate and beautiful carving (and gaming chips…) and the native North Americans and Australian aboriginals used mother of Pearl for trading, but the oldest piece of mother of pearl ever found has been carbon dated to Neolithic times in the Arabian Peninsular.