Pearl education
Pearl colors
Pearls are not white. Some are, and the white ones are the ones everybody pictures, but the natural range runs from silver through gold, peach, lavender, green, blue, aubergine and almost to black.
Every color you see on a pearl came from the animal that grew it. The pearl sac lays down nacre, and the pigment in that nacre follows the genetics of the donor tissue and the shell it came from. Different mollusks in different water produce different palettes, which is why the color range depends so much on the type.
This page sets out what occurs naturally in each type, what the trade means by bodycolor, overtone, tone and orient, and how to tell natural color from dyed.
~ Jeremy Shepherd, Founder and CEO of Pearl Paradise
The short answer
What colors do pearls come in naturally
Naturally: white, cream, silver, champagne, gold, pink, peach, lavender, green, blue, aubergine, bronze, brown and grays dark enough to read as black.
No single type produces all of them, and each has colors it makes often and colors that turn up once in a great while.
Two of the most common questions about pearls are whether they are all white and whether black pearls are real. The answers are no and yes. Most pearls sold are white because white is what the market has wanted for a century, not because pearls are white by nature.
The colors that do not occur are worth knowing, and there are fewer of them than people expect. Black akoya and black freshwater pearls are dyed, always. Almost everything else you will see somewhere, in some harvest, if you look for long enough.
The vocabulary that matters
Bodycolor, overtone, tone and orient
Four words the trade uses constantly and almost never explains.
Bodycolor
The pearl's main color, the one you would name from across a room. White, gold, gray, aubergine.
Overtone
A translucent second color lying over the bodycolor, most often rose, silver or green. It shifts as the pearl moves.
Tone
How light or dark the bodycolor is. Two pearls can share a color name and sit four steps apart on this scale.
Orient
Shifting iridescence produced by exceptional nacre structure, like oil on water. Genuinely uncommon.
A white pearl with a rose overtone and a white pearl with a green overtone are both white, and they do not look remotely alike in a mirror. Overtone is the reason two strands described identically can suit two different people, and the reason the trade names colors in pairs.
Light or dark
Tone
Tone is how light or dark a pearl is. It matters most in Tahitian pearls, where the range runs from pale silver almost to black.
Tone is not a fourth thing beside bodycolor, overtone and orient. It is a measurement of the bodycolor: how far along the range from pale to nearly black it sits.
Two Tahitian strands can both be described as gray and sit four steps apart. One reads as pale silver across a room, the other as nearly black. The trade works in five steps.
Pale and bright. The silvers and light grays that read almost as white pearls from a distance.
Clearly colored but still bright. Overtones tend to be easiest to see here.
The middle of the range, and the most common tone in most harvests.
Deep enough to read as a dark pearl, with the bodycolor still clearly identifiable.
Approaching black. What you notice is the overtone moving across the surface.
All else being equal, darker costs more. Plain light gray is among the least expensive Tahitian material there is, and a dark lot of comparable quality costs considerably more, because darker is rarer.
We buy mostly medium dark. That is where I think more of the best colors live, and it is the most popular tone with customers by a distance. Dark through to nearly black is sought after too, with one trade-off: as tone deepens the overtone gets harder to see, and past a point you are buying depth rather than color play.
The exception that stops this being a rule is a light or medium light lot with genuinely fancy color, real pistachio or a vivid peacock at a bright tone. Those are rare and expensive, and they invert the whole pattern.
The reference
Which colors occur naturally, by type
What each mollusk tends to produce, and the handful of colors that only come from a dye bath.
White and cream bodycolors, with rose, silver or green overtones. Natural silver-blue and blue akoya occur and are considerably rarer than white. Yellow, gold and even pistachio akoya turn up occasionally, and they are rare enough that most people never see one.
Always dyed: black akoya.
A very wide natural palette. White, cream, pink, peach, lavender and plum are common. Bronze, copper, deep purple and green occur and are rarer. Bead-nucleated freshwater reaches intensities that were not achievable twenty years ago.
Always dyed: black freshwater.
The widest tonal range of any type, from light silver through to nearly black, in gray, green, blue, aubergine, bronze, copper and brown. Overtones include peacock, green, purple, rose, cherry and pistachio. Gold and near-white Tahitians exist and are genuinely rare. All of it natural, and treatment is illegal in French Polynesia.
Two families from the same species. Silver-lipped shell gives white, silver and cream, with rose or silver overtones. Gold-lipped shell gives champagne through deep gold, and deep saturated gold is the rarest color in cultured pearls.
Nature produces exceptions to everything on this page, and unusual pearls turn up in every harvest. Treat this as what each mollusk reliably does rather than as a boundary.
The name everyone knows
Peacock
Peacock is the best known color term in Tahitian pearls, and one of the least precisely used. It describes a dark pearl with green and rose or reddish overtones playing across the surface, the effect you see on a peacock feather rather than a single color.
Peacock is an overtone rather than a bodycolor, so a peacock pearl still has a bodycolor underneath, usually gray or charcoal or green. The term also has no agreed definition, so the same word covers a considerable range.
It is a term to judge with your eyes rather than to buy on. A fine peacock Tahitian is a remarkable pearl, and the play of color across it is the whole reason.
The rarest natural colors
Blue akoya and deep gold
Two natural colors sit apart from the rest.
Natural blue and silver-blue akoya are among the most sought-after akoya in the market, and the color is entirely natural. It comes from a dark layer that formed underneath the nacre while the pearl was growing, seen through the nacre laid over the top of it. That is also why no two are quite alike, and why they are almost always baroque.
Deep golden South Sea is the other. Champagne and light gold are relatively common within gold-lipped production. Saturated deep gold is not, and it is the single most valuable color in cultured pearls.
When color is added
Treated color, and how to spot it
Plenty of treated pearls are attractive and honestly sold. What matters is knowing which you are looking at, because natural color and treated color are priced very differently.
Two treatments account for nearly all of it. Dyeing is by far the most common. Irradiation darkens freshwater pearls and can produce blues and grays. Bleaching and pinking are near-universal on white akoya and are generally considered standard processing rather than treatment, though where that line sits is argued about in the trade.
What gives dye away is concentration. It gathers where it can pool, so the drill hole shows it first, then any pit or blemish on the surface. Natural color is even through those features. Dyed color is darker in them.
Two other signals. Color that is unusually uniform across a whole strand, since natural color varies pearl to pearl. And a price that does not match the rarity being claimed, which is the loudest of the three.
Two named colors worth explaining
Chocolate and pistachio
Chocolate pearls are brown, and how they got that way varies. Plenty are natural. We see natural chocolate most often in Fijian pearls, and Tahitian pearls produce natural browns and bronzes too. Treated chocolate also exists, usually made from lower-grade dark Tahitian material, and the name stuck to both versions when the color became fashionable in the mid two thousands.
Pistachio is a soft yellow-green, most often an overtone over a lighter gray body. It occurs naturally and it is uncommon, which makes a full strand of it genuinely difficult to assemble.
We often have both, either as strands built entirely from one color or mixed through a strand alongside others. Our Fijian pearls carry them most prominently, and Tahitians sometimes. If you are looking for either, ask us and we will tell you what is in the vault.
What color is worth
Preference and rarity are different questions
Which color you want is entirely your business, and nobody should tell you otherwise. What that color costs is not a matter of taste at all.
Price follows rarity within the type. Deep gold commands a premium in South Sea because most gold-lipped production is lighter. Peacock and aubergine command premiums in Tahitian because most production is plain gray. Natural blue commands a premium in akoya because most akoya are white. In each case the premium exists because the harvest produces little of it, not because the color is objectively better.
The practical consequence is that the color you like may be the cheap one, and that is a good position to be in. A fine strand in an ordinary color will always beat a mediocre strand in a fashionable one.
Before you decide
See them in person, or close to it
Color is the hardest thing to judge from a photograph, because overtone and orient only exist in moving light and no camera captures them fully. If a color matters to you, it is worth seeing before you commit. We are happy to show you anything over video, in daylight, turning in the hand.
