Pearls are beautiful, but they are the result of pain and death.

These precious jewels are created inside the oysters when a foreign body enters the interior of the mollusk, be it a parasite, a small fragment of shell or a grain of sand. As a method of protection, the oyster wraps the invading body with a substance called mother-of-pearl, made up of calcium carbonate and water. In other words, technically pearls are cysts made of mother-of-pearl. 

The detail is that due to the demand for pearls for jewelry, human intervention is needed to introduce foreign bodies into the oysters and thus produce pearls, since naturally it does not happen so frequently (oysters do not get foreign bodies all the time). time). 

To supply the demand, specially bred oysters are farmed to produce pearls, a process that takes more than three years until a pearl is large enough and ready for harvest. Unfortunately, more than half of the molluscs die before the pearls are harvested and less than 10% are capable of producing pearls of the quality required for jewelry. 

The extraction process is painful for the oyster, and deadly for most of them. The oyster has to be opened and it is cut with a scalpel until the oyster is found, which in some cases is difficult to extract. The ones that don't die are reused to grow pearls, eventually dying at some point in the process. 

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Personally, I am against the use of jewelry of all kinds, since the impact of mining and the production/obtainment of the jewelry or minerals that are used for it, generally has innumerable side effects and I believe that if we obtain minerals it should be to improve our life in some aspect and not to "beautify, appear rich or any other banal thing like that"