These are natural blue Akoya pearl stud earrings.

The pearls are not perfectly round. Their luster is about 80 out of 100 by my own strict standard.

My idea of 100-point luster is extremely demanding: a pearl with an almost perfectly smooth, mirror-like surface, shining almost like a polished metal ball.

At the pearl farm where I worked, pearls at that level accounted for only around 3% of the harvest. I spent about ten years sorting more than one million pearls each year during harvest season, so my grading standard tends to be rather strict.

Although I give these pearls 80 points, they still have strong and attractive luster.

When choosing pearls, I personally place more importance on luster and the thickness of the nacre than on perfect roundness.

Round pearls generally command higher prices in the pearl market. However, roundness itself does not necessarily mean that a pearl is more beautiful or of higher quality. A pearl can be perfectly round and still have weak luster or thin nacre. On the other hand, a slightly irregular pearl can have beautiful depth, strong luster, and thick nacre.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy working with baroque and slightly irregular Akoya pearls.

If you have a limited budget, allowing a little variation in shape can often make it possible to choose pearls with stronger luster and better nacre instead. For me, those qualities are much more important to the essential beauty of a pearl.

Pearls have many different kinds of beauty. Some shine with an intense, almost metallic brilliance, while others have a softer and deeper glow.

These earrings belong to the latter world: natural blue Akoya pearls with a beautiful shine, individual shapes, and the character that comes from being real pearls created by living oysters.

They are not perfectly round.

And I think that is perfectly fine.

Flower Jem ｜ Pearl Bless You

If you would like to read more about why I do not consider roundness the most important measure of pearl beauty, please visit:

The True Value of Pearls: Beyond Round vs. Baroque

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