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ny fashionista worth her handbags would do well to remember the saying, 'Put on your pearls, girls'. It was featured coquettishly by Lulu Guinness across bags she designed a few years back. Born into the Guinness fortune, Lulu Guinness sure knows her pearls.

What is a pearl, actually? Let's imagine a sea object that accidentally intrudes into a living, shelled mollusk. The mollusk then creates a defensive layer of calcium carbonate and conchiolin to cover the intruder, repeatedly, which eventually crystallizes into a hard object (often round, but sometimes an irregular shape called baroque). That hard object is known as natural pearl.

Natural pearls are flukes of nature and have been fashioned into jewelry or adornments for thousands of years by royalty worldwide.

Reigning over Egypt in 51-30 BC, arguably the world's richest kingdom at the time, Cleopatra not only braided loose pearls into her hair, but was said to have dissolved an entire pearl in vinegar to impress the visiting Roman general, Mark Anthony.

In 15th'16th century Spain, dozens of armadas were sent to discover new lands and secure pearls, precious stones, gold, silver and spices. Note that the pearl was put at the top of the list, above precious stones and gold.

In the summer of 1498, Christopher Columbus found possibly the world's richest pearl-laden seabed around Cubagua and Margarita, now part of Venezuela. Native Indians on those islands viewed bright objects, like lustrous pearls, as vessels carrying divine light and, hence, in probably one of the most lopsided exchanges recorded in modern history, traded their natural pearls for even shinier objects carried by the Spanish fleets ' glasses. Oh Queen Isabella, how I envy thee.

In 2007, Christie's recorded US$6.3 million for an auction of two strands of 68 matching natural pearls that once belonged to Maharaja Baroda in India ' the land where pearls have been adored for 3,500 years, a whole millennium ahead of Cleopatra.

After centuries of being harvested, natural pearls are becoming increasingly rare. Over 90 percent of pearls nowadays are cultured, in which growth is induced by implanting a mantle tissue from a donor shell into a recipient shell, a technique patented by Kokichi Mikimoto in 1916. Pearls can be farmed in seawater and freshwater, and since they are genetically managed, they are almost perfectly round and, as the latest trend seems to suggest, getting larger.

My love affair with pearls began in the late 1980s when my parents relocated to Ambon. The Maluku Islands and later, I learned, Lombok are homes to Indonesia's seawater pearls, natural and cultured.

On my first visit, Mom took me to a street in downtown Ambon lined with pearl stores. As I understood, most of the pearls sold there at the time were still natural.

On one visit I even met a seasoned pearl diver, to whom the shopkeeper had to speak loudly as his hearing was impaired from years of deep diving with minimal gear.

When several years later Ambon was rocked by sectarian conflict, Mom, who had relocated to another province, got calls from some Ambonese pearl traders fleeing in panic, offering their merchandise.

To me pearls are pretty, pristine and phenomenally feminine. Gold and diamonds can be arranged to adorn men in a manly fashion, yet pearls are just for us girls.

The little real jewelry I own mostly comprises gifts or hand-me-downs from Mom, yet while I was never tempted to buy cubic zirconia (fake diamonds), I could not resist the lure of pearl costume jewelry long before I could afford the real McCoy.

Yet strangely, Indonesian women have never really warmed to pearls. Even as the Indonesian nouveau riches snapped up Chanel bags in their hordes, they never really took note from Coco Chanel's love for pearls ' real and faux.

Many cited the lack of a universally agreed appraisal method, rendering pearls less desirable than gold and diamonds. Some resorted to myth, saying pearls resembled tears and, hence, were inauspicious for single girls seeking a husband (don't ask). Perhaps Indonesians did not know that when pearls were called 'tears of mermaids' in Marlene Dietrich's 1936 movie Desire, it was meant as a compliment.

I find it preposterous that while pearls have been prized since ancient times and are included as one of the world's five precious stones, as cited on Cally Hall's much-referenced 1994 gemstone handbook, there is still no standard appraisal for pearls.

So subjective are pearl valuations and pricing that French Polynesia tried, and failed, to regulate the prices of their precious black Tahitian pearls through a national co-op.

International jewelry label Mondial tried answering this by launching the world's first GIA-certified pearls. Mondial is renowned for purveying serious diamonds certified by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), so I was excited to attend the event. And true, the South Sea pearls on offer were lustrously luxurious to the point of dizzying.

However, as I seriously mulled splurging months of income on a dazzling 14-milimeter pearl ring, Economics 101 sprang to mind. Isn't the value of an object determined by agreement between at least two consenting parties?

So, what does certification actually mean when it is only issued and recognized by one player in the market? Can these certified pearls readily be accepted and valued, as gold and GIA-certified diamonds, within one's total assets by, say, financial institutions?

I am still mulling over this basic question as I retrieve my jewelry box, putting on a few pearls I have accumulated over the years. They are indeed a bevy of beauties. World certified or not, you have got to put on your pearls, girls.

Lynda Ibrahim is a Jakarta-based writer and consultant, with a penchant for purple, pussycats and pop culture.