Award-winning jewelry designer Chi Huynh believes in transformation. His company, Galatea, founded in 1994, is best known for its carved cultured pearls and Diamond in a Pearl™ concepts. But his most recent transformational endeavor — the Galatea Pearl™ — goes to the very heart of how pearls are created.
The Galatea Pearl is a gem bead-nucleated pearl that is carved to reveal the gemstone beneath the nacre. Protected by U.S. and international patents from pearl-producing countries, this proprietary process uses a bead nucleus fashioned from gemstones instead of shell, so the pearl is actually grown with the gem inside. Huynh then carves away sections of the pearl to expose the colorful gemstone “irritant” within.
At the core of Hyunh’s vision for the Galatea Pearl is the message that through struggle, something beautiful can emerge, a significant theme in Huynh’s own life. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Huynh remained in his homeland until 1981, when he left to join his siblings in -Southern California. He cites the harrowing 18-day journey by boat from Vietnam — during which he faced pirate attacks and the deaths of several passengers — and his experience as a refugee in Thailand as “spiritual turning points” that have fueled his quest to see and create beauty.
The Process
The Galatea Pearl was born through trial and error. Huynh recounts how people advised him against using a gem bead because it would be too heavy for the pearl sac and gravity would kill the oyster. “So, we discovered that we needed to flip the oyster more often,” he explains, “letting it heal in between.”
Oysters remain in the water for 11 to 16 months, with the best pearls for carving produced in oysters undergoing their second nucleation. The benefit is that the bead is inserted into an existing pearl sac, so the resulting pearl is without the layer of 0.2-millimeter-thick white calcium that is not nacre, which forms in the first nucleation.
A variety of affordable semiprecious gem beads are used in the process, including amethyst, citrine, rutillated quartz and red carnelian, even white pearl. Pearl prices are based on the gems used as nuclei, but Huynh says Galatea Pearls are not much more expensive than shell bead-cultured pearls.
Galatea Pearls never use gems containing iron or other ferrous metals or gems that are chemically treated so as not to endanger the oyster or the environment. Although turquoise, a favorite gem used by Huynh, contains copper, it is not used in its natural state and instead is stabilized with a safe resin. “Actually, the oysters we use particularly like the reconstructed turquoise we have specially designed for Galatea Pearls,” he says.
Stalled by Export Laws
Huynh began the Galatea Pearl project in 2002 in French Polynesia, but discovered early on that local law restricted the nucleus in pearl cultivation to bead made from bivalve mollusks. He petitioned the government to change the law while continuing to conduct product research and development, as well as file patent applications, and harvest and stockpile pearls. It took six years, but the law finally was amended in March 2010, classifying Galatea’s gem-bead nucleation as “enucleation.” The new ruling allows the company to immediately begin exporting the 10,000 black Tahitian Galatea Pearls that had been harvested since 2006. Future harvests are expected to yield 20,000 similar black pearls.
While awaiting the change in the law that would allow him to export the pearls he was harvesting in French Polynesia, Huynh returned to his homeland of Vietnam and established farming operations in the central part of the country off the island of Ap Nhan Chau, hiring his in-laws to manage the operation. In his hometown of Soc Trang, about 140 miles south of Saigon, he built a factory to carve the pearls and set them in finished jewelry, hiring his family, friends and neighbors to work for him.
It Takes a Village
It takes two to four hours to carve a pearl, says Huynh, who describes the skill as intuitive, likening it to playing the violin. “You can hear when you’re out of tune or not, just as you can hear when you’re close to the bead — the sound is different.”
Huynh spent two years training pearl carvers and others in various jewelry-making skills. “When you get a job in Vietnam, it’s like winning the lottery,” he says. “So, it’s a gift for me to be able to do this.” Huynh wants to give back to those around him, considering himself fortunate for his success, and is convinced that, just as a rising tide lifts all boats, helping those around him surrounds him with good karma.
“There’s a rice field and my factory,” he says. About 70 people work there, 12 of whom specialize in pearl carving. Galatea also employs 11 traveling sales representatives and a 12-artisan custom shop in San Dimas, California, where Huynh lives with his wife and children.
Production from the Vietnamese farm is expected to increase in the next few years, says Huynh, but he notes that pearl cultivation in the country is quota-restricted for oysters harvested in the wild. To encourage greater production over time, Galatea is spawning young oysters for nucleation in hatcheries. The first crop of Vietnamese-grown Galatea Pearls, harvested in the summer of 2009, consisted of 2,500 black and 1,800 white and golden pearls. The company expects to harvest four times that volume in 2010.
Unlike in French Polynesia, home to the black-lipped oyster, Huynh says there are a variety of colors from the pearl-producing oysters in the waters of Vietnam. “In the center of Vietnam, you have more black-lipped oysters. Down south, there are more white and golden maxima oysters. North, you get more Akoya oysters,” he explains.
Transformation is a main theme for Huynh, even in the naming of his company. “Galatea is a Greek statue that came to life,” he explains. He believes that in transforming the farming and nucleation of pearls, as well as the look of pearl jewelry, the Galatea Pearl, like the Greek statue, has taken on a life of its own.
Article from the Rapaport Magazine - June 2010. To subscribe click here.