Tag Archives: freshwater pearls

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Farm

Nearly every pearl available anywhere in the world is farmed – cultured. Pearl farms tend to be stunningly beautiful places.

Shot of the Kamoka Tahitian pearl farm on Ahe, French Polynesia

Pearl farm on Talesei Island, Indonesia…golds and white south sea pearls

Faux Pearl

A false pearl bead manufactured by coating the inside of a hollow glass sphere or the outside of a solid glass or plastic sphere with a pearlescent coating which is sometimes pearl powder. Faux is a fancy word for fake. Also called shell pearls. They are of course perfectly round in shape, with great lustre and even colour. White shell pearls are very white, which is a give-away. All fake pearls feel smooth when rubbed on the teeth and the drill holes tend to be larger.

Fiji

There is a young but growing pearl industry in Fiji, and the pearls produced have a huge and stunning range of colours, mostly shifted away from typical Tahitian colours into the chocolates and earthy shades

Newly harvested, straight from the shell, Fiji pearls

Freshwater

A pearl grown in a freshwater river, lake or pond margaritifera mollusc. Often more irregular in shape and more varied in colour than salt water pearls freshwater molluscs are nucleated by creating a small incision in the fleshy mantle tissue and inserting a piece of mantle tissue from another mussel. This process may be completed 25 times on either side of the mantle, producing up to 50 pearls at a time. The molluscs are then returned to their freshwater environment where they are tended for 2-6 years. The resulting pearls are of solid nacre, but without a bead nucleus to guide the growth process, the pearls are rarely round.

Sustainable pearls, ethical pearls.

I’ve had several enquiries recently about sustainable pearls and/or ethical pearls. (the terms seem to be used interchangeably). The standard pearl industry answer is that it is impossible to supply sustainable pearls or ethical pearls because pearls from many sources get mixed together indistinguishably in their journey between farm and wearer.

Most pearl farms are sustainable and ethical because they are often staffed by family, or with a small local staff which helps the local economy and in any case pearl farms have to be environmentally pretty sound because all molluscs are ready to die off at the least excuse – too hot, too cold, too salty, too brackish, too freshwater (sea pearl farms can be wiped out by a series of thunderstorms inland diluting the saline environment near a delta for example). They are all like Goldilocks, everything must be just right. Then they can reject the graft, get infected, get choked by weeds so they starve.

But most pearls on sale travel from farm to pearl factory to wholesaler to importer to local wholesaler to retailer. At Pearlescence we cut out a couple of those stages as we usually buy pearls which travel farm to factory to wholesaler to us. For most sea pearls – gold, blue and white south seas, Tahitian and Akoya this is true, and for all freshwater pearls.

But, on the plane on the way to Hong Kong I had plenty of time to think (oh how I wish Hong Kong was a bit nearer!) and realised that I know enough sea pearl farmers and farms individually to cover most types of salt water pearls (yes to Tahitian, Sea of Cortez and Vietnamese Akoya) . Freshwater pearls were going to be the problem, simply because they invariably go from farm to pearl factory where the harvests from many farms is mixed, graded, blended, treated and turned into wholesale-ready product.

(This blog post will also dispel the myth put about by some freshwater pearl seller that they buy pearls direct from the farm and their stock is full of strands)

As the flight progressed I remembered that I know one family with its own small factory. The result was that before I left a 1 kilo scoop of pearls had been taken from a lot of pearls as they came into the factory, before any treatment, mixing, sorting or anything was done to them. Nothing done except a quick wash.

The bag of pearls, just as they came from the farm to the factory, before any processing

The more I look at them the more fascinating this snapshot of the production from one Chinese pearl farm is. The colour is predominantly a pale peach, with degrees up to pretty orange. Most of the pearls are elliptical or potato, with lots of buttons too. Sizes range from a couple of mm to about 12mm with around 7mm to 8mm being the average. Most pearls have a decent surface, although some have rings. But it is the quality of the lustre which is most intriguing. Most of the lustre is around A+ or AA. There are quite a few pearls with no lustre at all, completely flat and dull,while maybe a hundred have enough lustre and colour for me to buy them. There’s even a single white tiny rosebud/granulated pearl!

Here are the bad pearls – you can see the ugly black deposits, the lack of lustre, and general yuckness

The bad pearls really are dire – as the photo shows. Some of them look like teeth which have been left to the mercy of a really incompetent dentist, who has made merry with old fashioned amalgam, which others are completely without any lustre, just chalk. There’s one of these which is nearly all completely dull but with an intensely metallic tip.

Anyway, we are going to attempt a few pairings and see if we can make some single farm source stud and dangle earrings out of the better pearls.

We also brought back some of the crushed walnut shell used to buff the pearls so I intend to try doing that to see how the average pearls and the good already pearls are improved. The buffing is allowed (maeshori) as it is no different to buffing up your fingernails to put a shine on them

What this experiment shows mostly is that pearl factories work; the good quality pearls which Pearlescence offers really are the top 0.5% (or less) of any general pearl harvest, and that you can find single farm sustainable pearls if you have the contacts!

Two stunning pearl necklaces.

Not posted for a while….it’s been busy but uneventful, with added stock sorting. And compiling lists of wants and needs and requests for Hong Kong next week. Wendy will be making blog entries every day, with photos so follow the first pearl adventure of the year

Until then, here are two stunning necklaces sold by pearl friends

First is a necklace of perfect archetypical peacock Tahitians from one of the world’s biggest wholesalers of Tahitians, Wiart Loic.

The green body colour and aubergine ‘eye on each huge perfectly round tahitian is …….oh…….perfection.

Second, this necklace of huge white round pearls is made up of freshwater pearls..yes, really, freshwater pearls. It comes from lovely Jack Lynch of Sea Hunt Pearls. He’s the man who coined the name ‘souffle’ for the huge hollow pearls.

The pearls are 15.4mm to 19.3mm and would have been yours for a modest $20k, if you had got to him before his buyer..but it does go to show that fabulous freshwater pearls are just as much fabulous pearls as their equally bead nucleated cousins these days.

Nacre depth on bead nucleated freshwater pearls

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There’s been a lot of debate recently about the nacre depth on bead nucleated freshwater pearls, along with concerns about the materials being used as the nucleus.

Rather fortuitously while we were making up some necklaces recently and enlarging the drill holes so the silk can be doubled back and hidden two pearls split neatly in half.

One was a white 12.6mm Ming – metallic lustre with rainbow overtones and the other was a prototype small Edison white round of 9.5mm and rippled creamier nacre (If you don’t know the two pearl brand names don’t worry, just ignore).

Nacre depth is a real problem with saltwater Akoya pearls. Some pearls spend such a short time being grown that you can see the bead through the nacre (this is known as blinking because the pearls appear to blink when rolled back and forth). Thin nacre is one of the reasons why we have not carried an extensive stock of Akoya pearls up to now – although having found a couple of suppliers who guarantee decent nacre we will be stocking them more in future)

Tahitian and South Sea pearls are always grown on an inserted bead

But bead nucleation has exploded onto freshwater pearls in just the last few years. With large grower to wholesaler Grace pearl leading the way Chinese pearl farmers are producing huge round pearls from a schegeli/cumingii hybrid in the most amazing range of colours, some pastel and some deep, such as deep purples, as well as rippled surfaced pearls, nicknamed ripple pearls, with shimmering play of colours and often an effect like gold leaf has been added in patches.

Classic ripple pearls – pink, lavender, blues, and the gorgeous gold leaf overlay effect

Anyway, here is the result of the two broken pearls…

broken white bead nucleated pearls

You can clearly see the beads and the layer of nacre. In the smaller pearl the nacre is just 0.6mm thick (minimum depth for a Tahitian pearl is 0.8mm over 80% of the pearl surface) so that would be a fail, while the larger pearl has a happy 1.23mm of nacre. Plenty.