The CIBJO Pearl Commission working with professionals from the industry across the world has drafted anumberof improvements to the Pearl Blue Book of accepted standards, practices and nomenclature, which will be discussed and finalised at the 2016 CIBJO Congress in Yerevan, Armenia, on October 26, 2016.

The Commission, headed by Kenneth Scarratt, has also presented views on the development of the CIBJO Guide for Classifying Natural Pearls and Cultured Pearls; technological advances in pearl identification; responsible environmental practices; and a new law in Japan that is designed to bolster the country's pearl sector, in its brief report.

The CIBJO Guide for Classifying Natural Pearls and Cultured Pearls, an advanced draft of which will be placed before the Congress, represents an effort to place descriptions of all types of natural and cultured pearls in a single document, providing information on how to assess such things as lustre, colour, surface appearance, shape and size.

The report reviews two recent technological developments that will assist in the identification of pearls, including powerful 3-D software that has been developed by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), which is able to ascertain the exact cause of a natural pearl's formation, and the neutron imaging of pearls, which is being experimented with by the Swiss Gemmological Institute SSEF.

Scarratt concludes, “With the growing sophistication being employed by some to create 'pearls' that challenge the various identification techniques used in gem laboratories, it is always good to read reports about the increasing sophistication of the identification techniques themselves."