Know your pearls
A quick quide to the types of pearls widely used today's wedding jewellery and hair accessories.
Pearls can be divided into 2 main types: faux pearls and real pearls. The tooth test will tell you which you have - run the pearl over the cutting edge of your tooth - if it feels gritty it is a real pearl and if not it's a faux pearl (easy to remember - a "sandy" feel comes from the lake or sea!)
Faux Pearls
Faux is French for false and faux pearls or imitation pearls are man-made pearls - made to resemble the real thing. We use Swarovski faux pearls for our wedding jewellery as we believe they are the best on the market. They are made with a crystal centre which is then covered in a high quality pearlised coating. These pearls are available in a wide range of colours and sizes and have the advantage that they can always be exactly matched to each other.
The main wedding colours in Swarovski pearl are white and light creamrose which is ivory.
This is a Swarovski graduated pearl necklace made in the ivory colour. As all the pearls are perfectly round and come in many sizes just 1mm increments they are very good for this kind of design
Freshwater Pearls
These are real pearls made by freshwater mussels. They are farmed mainly in China in large lakes and it can take up to 3 years to grow a 6mm pearl.
In nature a little bit of something, like a grain of sand, enters the shell of a mollusc by accident. The shellfish finds this irritating and so secretes nacre around it to isolate it from it's body and as more and more nacre is laid down a pearl grows bigger and bigger. Pearls formed in this way are very rare and so extremely expensive. These are called natural pearls.
Freshwater pearls are cultured by inserting a small piece of mantle tissue into a mollusc. The reaction is the same as in nature - the foreign object causes the production of the nacre and the eventual formation of a pearl.
Shape, Colour and Size of Freshwater Pearls
The variations are almost without limit. From minute seed pearls to massive pearls, from white to black and round shapes to bizarre shaped stars or hearts or sticks!
Pearls are often dyed to give a greater range of colours and in brighter shades than that which occurs naturally or bleached to give a more uniform colour.
We buy white freshwater pearls and the colour of these varies slightly from one batch to another, but may be described as a pale to very pale ivory.
Baroque pearls are those with uneven shapes but the term usually applies to the larger uneven pearls and the smaller baroque pearls are often called nugget pearls.
This bracelet is a good example to show some of the variety one can get in freshwater pearls - it uses small nugget pearls, large baroque pearls and nearly round pearls
Price of Freshwater Pearls
The price of pearls depends up many factors but the main ones are size, shape, surface quality and rarity. All of these factors interact to determine a pearls price.
If we think of a perfectly round pearl in a very large size having a beautiful surface without any blemishes or imperfections and great lustre - this is what every pearl farmer will be striving for as this is what will fetch the highest price and will be very rare. Generally, the further away from the perfect pearl the lower the price.
The majority of our pearls are purchased directly from China and we continually seek out pearls for each design to bring you beautiful wedding jewellery at an affordable price. If only one or two pearls are to be used, like in a cravat pin or stud earrings we use a high grade AAA pearl. This grade of pearls in a full pearl necklace would be beyond the budget of most and so we buy different grades to suit various budgets and this is reflected in our pricing.
This is an example - the necklace on the left uses higher quality and so more expensive pearls than the one on the right. If you look carefully you can see the pearls are rounder and of a more even shape in the necklace on the left.
Both are beautiful!
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Necklace £80 Necklace £40
Because freshwater pearls are natural products traded on world markets prices are constantly changing and so we have to adjust our prices accordingly.
Further information
This is an excellent site for lots of information on all the different kinds of cultured pearls available
