Pearl education
Choosing a pearl necklace
Pearls are personal, and every one is different. The question we answer more than any other is simply: how do I choose the right ones?
If you are new to pearls, the range of options can be daunting. There are several types, a wide range of sizes and colors, and grading systems that do not agree with one another. It is confusing, and it is meant to be simpler than it looks.
Give me a few minutes. I will take you through what actually matters when you are choosing a strand, in the order it matters.
~ Jeremy Shepherd, Founder and CEO of Pearl Paradise
Before anything else
A grade is not a measurement
If you have spent any time researching pearls you have seen letters, numbers, symbols, and companies that publish no grades at all. There is a reason for that. No authority issues pearl grades. Each seller defines its own scale, applies it to the range of quality it chooses to buy, and the same letters mean different things from one company to the next.
Pearls graded AAA by one dealer could be graded A by another, on the same A to AAA scale, and both could be describing their inventory honestly.
So a grade is a starting point, not a specification. What you can actually compare is the pearls themselves and the person selling them. You should be able to see the exact strand, ask for more photographs, and speak to someone who can explain what you are looking at.
One thing to settle first
Natural or cultured
A lot of people arrive convinced that natural pearls are the serious choice and cultured pearls are the substitute. That gets it backwards. Both are real pearls. They form the same way, in the same animal, by the same process. The only difference is whether a person started it.
Natural pearls are real, they are extraordinary, and we sell them. Abalone, conch, melo and other naturals come to us as individual pearls, and when one is right we build a piece around it. Full natural strands exist as well, and we have them from time to time. Seed pearl strands turn up fairly regularly.
What is genuinely rare is a matched strand of fine round naturals. Assembling one takes decades of patient buying, and a good one trades well past a million dollars. There is no version of that at an ordinary price, so if you see one advertised cheaply, something is wrong with the description.
For almost everyone shopping for a strand, the answer is cultured pearls, and that is not a compromise. Pearl farming has been the source of essentially every pearl necklace worn in the last hundred years. Four types account for nearly all of it.
Type one
Akoya
Saltwater · Japan
Akoya are the classic pearl. Round, white, and above all lustrous. Luster is the quantity and quality of light reflecting off the surface, and on an akoya it is the factor that decides everything. It is also the honest indicator of how long the pearls stayed in the oyster.
An akoya oyster is nucleated with a round bead and should go back in the water for eighteen months to two years. Plenty of farmers harvest after a few months instead. Straight out of the water those pearls can look similar, but the nacre is thin, and thin nacre does not last. This is the single reason it matters who you buy from, because the difference is invisible at a glance and obvious in five years.
The finest akoya are called hanadama in the trade. It is a meaningful designation and we sell a lot of them, but it is not a price benchmark. There is no single hanadama standard across laboratories, and two strands can both be certified hanadama while one sells for a small fraction of the other.
Almost all akoya are white and round. Natural blue, silver-blue and golden akoya exist, along with baroque shapes, and they are genuinely rare. You will not find them in a jewelry store.
Type two
Freshwater
Freshwater · China
Freshwater pearls have been cultured almost as long as akoya, and in one sense they are more pearl: grown without a bead, they are solid nacre throughout. They are valued lower for a straightforward economic reason. A freshwater mussel can grow dozens of pearls at once. An akoya oyster grows one or two.
If the freshwater pearls you have seen were oddly shaped and dull, that is the bulk of the production and it is a fair impression. Fine freshwater is a different thing. The best of it, which we call Freshadama, is close to indistinguishable from fine akoya in shape, color and luster.
Freshwater also gives you natural pastel colors you cannot get anywhere else, and bead-nucleated freshwater now reaches sizes that were unthinkable twenty years ago. For a first strand, this is usually where I point people. You get the akoya look for less, in more colors.
Type three
Tahitian
Saltwater · French Polynesia
They are called black pearls, but that is only roughly true. Tahitians come in a range of colors wide enough that we describe every strand individually rather than pretend a short list covers it. Body colors run from pale silver through gray, green, aubergine and near black, and over the top of that sits an overtone: peacock, rose, pistachio, blue, cherry and others. The combinations are close to endless, which is the whole appeal and also why matching a strand takes so long.
They grow in the black-lip oyster, whose shell carries the same dark iridescence on its inner rim that the pearls take on.
I have a particular affinity for these. Over the years I have spent time in some of the remotest parts of French Polynesia, and on one trip I took a film crew out to a pearl farm and hosted a twenty minute documentary on how the pearls are grown and harvested. If you are considering a Tahitian strand, it is twenty minutes well spent.
Documentary · 20 min
The Tahitian Pearl
Hosted by Jeremy Shepherd, filmed on location in French Polynesia. First place in the Best Director category, International Family Film Festival.
Type four
South Sea
Saltwater · Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines
If you are looking at South Sea, you have probably bought pearls before. They are the largest and most valuable saltwater pearls farmed today, and they are not what I would normally suggest for a first strand, unless you are the sort of person who starts at the top.
The oyster that grows them is the size of a dinner plate, and the pearls come out the size of marbles. White and silver South Sea grow in the silver-lip; the golden ones, which are the most valuable of all, grow in the gold-lip. Their luster is different in character from an akoya, softer and more satiny, and once you have seen it beside a strand of akoya you will not confuse the two again.
These are statement pearls. It is not really possible to wear a strand of them and go unnoticed.
The decision people agonize over
Size
Every pearl below is photographed at true scale against every other. We lined them up ourselves to make this, because nothing accurate existed.
Solid: where most strands sit · Faded: occurs, less often · Neither end is a limit
- Akoya 7.0-7.5 mm
- The classic proportion. 8.0-8.5 mm is a close second. I would not go much smaller unless it is for a young girl.
- Freshwater 7.5-8.0 mm
- Fine freshwater is sorted in half-millimeter steps and it shows. A 7.5-8.0 mm strand is visibly larger, rounder and brighter than one sold as 7.0-8.0 mm.
- Tahitian 8.0-11.0 mm
- More than 90% of what we import falls here. Strands are usually graduated, smaller at the clasp and larger at the front.
- South Sea 10.0-14.0 mm
- If you are shopping South Sea you already want large pearls. This is the range that stays wearable every day.
Personal preference, with one rule of thumb
Length
Length is the one decision where there is no wrong answer, only the look you are going for. Shorter strands read as more casual, longer ones as more formal, though plenty of people ignore that entirely.
Sixteen and eighteen inches are the two most popular by a wide margin. Longer ropes at 35 inches and above are popular for a different reason: they can be worn long, doubled, or knotted.
How the strand is built
Knotting
A pearl necklace should be knotted between every pearl. The knots keep the pearls from rubbing against each other, and if the strand ever breaks they stop everything running loose at once.
We hand-knot on color-coordinated silk, which is the traditional method and the one we prefer. Synthetic threads resist stretching better and are used across the trade.
The exception is small graduated strands, where a knot between every pearl looks wrong. Those are knotted at the clasp only.
Still deciding?
Everything above narrows it down. What it cannot do is show you the pearls. Nothing on a screen fully substitutes for someone moving a strand through the light and telling you what you are seeing.
Our specialists will do exactly that, on camera, on your schedule. A consultation runs up to 45 minutes and most take about twenty.
Happy learning.
~ Jeremy Shepherd, Founder and CEO of Pearl Paradise
