Pearl Information Guide
Types of Pearls
Never before have there been so many different types of pearls available to the potential buyer. The wide variety of pearls available today can meet almost every personal style, taste and budget. This variety can be priced from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars per pearl.Probably the first thing to understand is that there is no such thing as a large, lustrous, white-pink, flawless, round, cheap pearl.
AUSTRALIAN SOUTH SEA PEARLS
The ‘Queen of Gems’ ... The Gems of royalty – Australian South Sea pearls have an international reputation as the most prized and prestigious of all pearls.Australian pearls are grown in the largest of all pearl oysters, Pinctada maxima, the giant silver-lip or gold-lip pearl oyster, which may reach a diameter of over thirty centimetres. The largest beds of these oysters in the world occur off the Eighty Mile Beach, south of Broome in the north-west of Western Australia. They produce pearls varying from 9 to 17 millimetres in diameter, with rare gems occasionally reaching 20 millimetres and even larger for irregular shaped or baroque pearls.
TAHITIAN SOUTH SEA PEARLS
Tahitian black pearls are not really black; rather they exhibit an amazing palette of colours, from soft grey through iridescent green to aubergine. The most prized, with the highest price, is the magnificent peacock colour with shades of green and purple – a truly magnificent gem.The pearling industry of French Polynesia was originally based on diving for wild stocks of black-lip pearl oysters, Pinctada margaritifera, which abound in and around the numerous atolls and islands of the region.
Some cultured pearls were produced in Tahiti experimentally in the 1960’s but it was only in the 1980’s that large-scale production began. The annual pearl production is now approximately five million pearls per annum.
The author of these articles, Bill Reed, has been involved in the Tahitian pearl industry since the very early days. He worked for the French and Tahitian Governments to research the possibilities of pearl farming in the region before establishing the company Tahiti Perles, which is now the largest pearl farm in French Polynesia.
JAPANESE AKOYA PEARLS
Until relatively recently, these were the types of pearls that most people envisaged when pearls were discussed. They are sometimes also referred to as Mikimoto pearls, as it was the remarkable pioneering pearl farmer and businessman, Koiichi Mikimoto, who really launched them onto the world market.Japanese cultured pearls are usually round in shape and they vary from about 3 to 8 millimetres in diameter. In earlier times they were often grown for several years to achieve a thick coating of pearl nacre over the nucleus. Because of pollution and deteriorating seawater quality in Japan there have been serious pearl oyster mortalities and most Japanese pearls are now grown for less than a year. The pearl coating over the nucleus is now seldom more than a fraction of a millimetre in thickness and such pearls are
quite fragile.
CHINESE FRESHWATER PEARLS
Freshwater pearls are cultivated in various species of mussel shells belonging to the genus Hyriopsis.Unlike South Sea pearls grown one at a time in the bodies of marine pearl oysters, freshwater pearls are grown in the thick mantle tissue of mussel shells. As many as 40 or even 50 pearls can be grown in a large adult mussel. Because they are usually nucleated only with the soft tissue and not with a hard bead, freshwater pearls take on all sorts of shapes. They contain far less protein tissue than pearls produced in marine pearl oysters and hence they are softer and less lustrous due their weaker texture.
While most of these pearls are small and of inferior quality, they are very inexpensive and thus affordable for pearl buyers with a modest budget. A very small percentage of Chinese pearls are large and good quality and these fetch high prices on the world market.