On first glance, the old black and white photo was typical – a group of society women fashionably dressed in dark colors staring and smiling straight into the camera. They could have just finished a special women’s club luncheon.
Looking closer at the photo among others on the auction table, I noticed one thing. Most of them wore pearls, dating them to a time when most women’s outfits were incomplete without them. I mentioned my observation to Paula, an auction regular like myself, who was checking out items nearby.
I can never tell if they are real, she said. Neither could I, for the most part, unless I buy them at auction and the auctioneer says they are real. But auctioneers don’t always know and they do tend to exaggerate.
I spotted a string of white beads entangled with a faux gold necklace on a tray of jewelry. “These are definitely not pearls,” I said. Neither was another beaded necklace on another tray.
I like pearls. For years, I wanted a strand of Mikimoto cultured pearls. My younger brother offered once to buy me a string while we were browsing in a jewelry store but I thought the price was too high – and these were on sale. So, I didn’t get those pearls, but I should have.
From time to time, I’ve picked up a few freshwater pearl necklaces at auction and have been out-bidded on some cultured pearls. Recently, I bought a double strand of black pearls that need to be restrung. The black is presumably a Tahitian pearl (the other quality saltwater pearls are Akoya and South Sea).
I’m not alone in my adoration of these little gems. My friend Valorie is always on the lookout for her next strand, even though she has about 20 pearl necklaces.
“They’re so elegant and they enhance your outfit,” she explained, noting that they are also versatile in lengths and size of the stones. “They’re ladylike. You can wear pearls with anything from jeans to evening gowns. It’s a fresh look, it’s a clean look, it’s an elegant look.”
She is also attracted to the clasps: “Some are really really really pretty,” she said.
We can now afford as many pearl necklaces as we want because they are inexpensive. That was not always the case. Natural pearls were affordable to only the wealthy until the early 1900s when cultured pearls were created.
Natural pearls are made when an intrusive item such as a piece of shell inadvertently enters the oyster shell. The oyster repeatedly coats it with a substance called nacre as a defense mechanism, producing what we call pearls. These natural pearls were (and still are) hard to come by. They were so expensive that one Roman general was said to have financed his war campaign by selling one of his mother’s pearl earrings.
From India to Egypt and beyond, pearls took a prominent hold, with most of them harvested in the saltwaters of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, and the coasts of India and the now-Sri Lanka.
Early in the history of this country, some Native Americans wore pearls. The country became known for its freshwater pearls and mother-of-pearl buttons, which were exported to Europe and other parts of the world.
A Japanese man named Kokichi Mikimoto made pearls inexpensive enough for everyone to own by enhancing a technique of using oysters to produce pearls unnaturally (through human intervention in hatcheries). He built an empire and a name on creating man-induced cultured pearls that many of us aspire to today.
Valorie noted that pearls had long been synonymous with debutante and cotillion balls in both African American and white middle-class society. In these coming-out parties, girls wore white dresses, white gloves and pearls (the gentry ones wore the family pearls).
As Paula noted, it’s hard to tell what is real and what is not. Googling, I found several resources on how to tell the difference along with tips on buying.
