Pearl education
Tahitian pearls
They are called black pearls, which is only roughly true. Tahitians come in a range of color wide enough that we describe every strand individually rather than pretend a short list covers it.
Tahitians grow in the black-lip oyster in the lagoons of French Polynesia. Their dark body color is entirely natural, and no other pearl produces this range of it at any scale.
I wear a strand of these. I gave up neckties years ago and wear Tahitians instead: 11 mm, green body color, peacock overtones, a strand I matched myself close to twenty years ago. I have been going to French Polynesia for about twenty-five years, and on one trip I took a film crew out to a pearl farm and hosted a documentary about how they are grown.
~ Jeremy Shepherd, Founder and CEO of Pearl Paradise
The short version
What makes a Tahitian a Tahitian
Tahitians grow in Pinctada margaritifera, the black-lip oyster, and specifically in the variety known as cumingii. It is a large animal, and the inner rim of its shell carries the same dark iridescence the pearls take on. Look at the shell and you can see where the color comes from.
Like akoya and South Sea, the oyster is bead-nucleated, and the pearl grows as a nacre coat over that bead. The growing period runs around eighteen months to two years, and because the water is warm the nacre goes down thicker than it does on an akoya.
Nothing about the color is added. Donor tissue from a black-lip shell forms the pearl sac, and the nacre it lays down carries that shell's color into the pearl. This is why farmers choose donor shells on the color of the inner rim.
Tahitian names both an origin and a variety. A different variety of the same species, typica, is farmed in Fiji and produces a noticeably different palette, and those are sold as Fijian pearls. There is a section on that below. One other place produces naturally dark pearls in small numbers, the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, from a different animal entirely. Outside those three, a pearl sold as black has been dyed or irradiated. Treated freshwater and treated akoya are both common and both cheap.
- Oyster
- Pinctada margaritifera var. cumingii, the black-lip
- Water
- Saltwater
- Farmed in
- French Polynesia. The typica variety is farmed in Fiji
- Usual size
- 8.0 to 13.0 mm. Larger occurs
- Natural color
- Body from pale silver through gray, green, aubergine and near black, with overtones over the top
- Time in water
- Around eighteen months to two years
The reason people fall for these
Color
Tahitian color works on two axes, and understanding the difference is most of what you need to shop them well.
Body color is the underlying color of the pearl. It runs from pale silver through gray, green, aubergine and on to near black.
Overtone is the color that sits over the top of it and moves as the pearl turns. Peacock, rose, pistachio, blue and cherry are the ones you will hear most often.
What still gets me about these is what the color does across a single pearl. A drop can start silver at the top, run through green or aubergine toward the bottom, and put a whole spectrum in the transition. And the overtones hold their place as the pearl moves. A strong peacock in the center stays in the center. A purple halo around the edge stays at the edge. You can turn the pearl and the color stays put.
Peacock is an overtone, not a body color. That distinction gets blurred constantly in the trade, and it matters, because a peacock overtone over a green body and a peacock overtone over an aubergine body are two very different strands sold under the same word.
The combinations are close to endless. That is the whole appeal, and it is also why matching a strand takes so long and why a well matched strand costs what it does. It is also why we describe every Tahitian strand individually rather than assigning it a color name and leaving it there.
More variety than any other type
Shape
Round Tahitians are a small share of the harvest and priced accordingly. French Polynesia classifies the rest into semi-round, semi-baroque, baroque and circled, and none of those is a reject. They are categories in their own right.
Drop shapes are prized for earrings and pendants, where symmetry matters more than roundness. Circle pearls, sometimes called circlé, carry grooved rings around the pearl and are one of the most distinctive things in pearls. Baroque covers everything free-form.
Circles in particular are worth a look. They were once treated as low-grade material and priced that way. Today a circled strand with strong color and luster is a fixture of contemporary jewelry, it is unmistakably Tahitian, and it is far more interesting to wear than a round strand at the same price.
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.
Bigger than akoya, smaller than South Sea
Size
Every pearl below is a real Tahitian, photographed at true scale against the others.
More than 90% of what we import falls between 8.0 and 11.0 mm. The full range runs wider than that, and exceptional pearls go well beyond it.
Nothing above has been resized. The 8 mm sits at the bottom of what we carry and the 12 mm is a little above the middle. The 15 mm is already uncommon, and the 18 mm is close to as large as a Tahitian gets. We carry most of the sizes in between.
Tahitian strands are usually graduated, meaning the pearls run smaller at the clasp and larger at the front. That is partly aesthetic and partly practical: it lets a matcher build a strand from a harvest that will not yield forty identical pearls.
Where they grow
French Polynesia
The farms are spread across the atolls of the Tuamotu and Gambier archipelagos, hundreds of miles from Tahiti itself, in lagoons that are among the most remote working places on earth. Getting to one is a flight and then a boat, and then usually another boat.
I have been going to French Polynesia for about twenty-five years. Most of the business is done on Tahiti, where the farmers and brokers keep their offices, but I have visited farms at Marutea Sud, Takaroa and several other atolls. I have slept in a grafting shack and worked a harvest.
The thing I have never forgotten happened after one of those harvests. A farmer went through what had come up, picked out the pearls he judged not good enough, and threw them into the ocean. Not sold cheaply, not set aside. Thrown back, because in his view they were not fit to go out under the Tahitian name.
The photograph from Takaroa, in the Tuamotus, was taken in 2012. I sat down with the farmer, Paul Yu, and went through his harvest with him. Two lots of pearls on a towel is what a year and a half in the water actually looks like before any of it is sorted, drilled or matched.
Farming here depends on the lagoon in a way no other pearl type does. The oysters are grown from spat collected in the lagoon itself rather than bred in hatcheries, so the health of the water sets the ceiling on what a farm can produce. A pearl farm is not separate from its lagoon. It is part of it.
Production has contracted substantially from its peak. Overexpansion in the 1990s flooded the market, the 2007 recession finished the job, and many farms closed. One consequence is worth knowing about: for years French Polynesia enforced a minimum nacre thickness of 0.8 mm at export, checked by X-ray. That requirement was dropped in the 2017 reforms. Nacre thickness still determines how a Tahitian wears and what it is worth, but it is no longer guaranteed at the border, which puts the burden back on whoever is buying.
A different variety, different water
Fijian pearls
The black-lip oyster is not confined to French Polynesia. A different variety of it is farmed in Fiji, and what comes out is different enough that the trade gives it its own name.
French Polynesia farms Pinctada margaritifera var. cumingii. Fiji farms var. typica, which is a smaller animal with warmer color in the shell. Same species, different variety, in the same way that white and golden South Sea are two varieties of Pinctada maxima.
Same nucleation, similar growing period. What changes is the variety, the water and the donor stock, and the result is a warmer palette: gold, bronze and copper alongside the greens, where French Polynesia runs to green, aubergine and near black.
Hisano and I first visited the J. Hunter farm in 2011. He is the pioneer of pearl farming in Fiji, and the operation is very small, around 25,000 pearls a year. That number is the whole story of why you almost never see Fijian pearls. We carry the largest collection of his pearls in the United States.
They are worth seeing beside a Tahitian strand, because the difference is obvious once the two are together and difficult to convey any other way.
What they are worth
Value
Tahitians sit second by average value behind South Sea, and comfortably above akoya and freshwater. An average Tahitian strand runs in the range where a top-quality akoya strand also sits, which is a useful reference point when you are deciding between them.
Within Tahitians, color does more to move price than it does in any other type. Two strands of the same size, shape and luster can differ severalfold on color and matching alone, and that is not a grading artifact. It is what the market actually pays for.
What moves the price, in roughly this order: size, color and overtone, surface cleanliness, luster, shape, and matching.
French Polynesia does grade Tahitians officially, on an A through D scale, but that system weighs surface quality and luster and does not grade color at all. A grade tells you something. It does not tell you what the strand is worth.
Shop Tahitian
Tahitian is the type where seeing the pearls matters most, because no color description survives contact with the actual strand. Our specialists will move one through the light on camera and tell you what you are looking at.
