Every pearl, accounted for.
The farm it grew on. The year it was lifted. Its nacre measured in millimetres, and its grade with our gemologist's name against it. We publish all of it, on every piece, before you buy — not after.
Most pearl houses ask you to take their word for it.
Walk into almost any pearl retailer and you will be shown a letter grade — AAA, AAAA, sometimes AAAAA — that the seller assigned to their own stock. There is no governing body behind those letters. There is no agreed scale. A pearl one house calls AAA is another house's AA, and neither of them is lying, because the word does not mean anything.
So we stopped using it. Every piece here carries the seven measurements the Gemological Institute of America actually assesses — size, shape, colour, lustre, surface, nacre and matching — written out in full, with the farm and the harvest year, signed by the person who graded it. You can compare it against anything else on the market, including ours.
Three bodycolours under one light — white and golden South Sea, and a Tahitian. Nothing here is dyed, bleached or irradiated.
The reflection has a border. That is the test.
Lustre is most of the price, and no screen can show it.
Hold a pearl under a window and look at the reflection of the window frame in its surface. On an excellent pearl the reflection has a defined edge — you can see exactly where the frame stops. On a poor one it spreads and fades into a bright patch.
It takes four seconds, it needs no equipment, and it will tell you more than any letter grade. It is also why we would rather you came in than bought from a photograph, and why our appointments are free and carry no expectation.
Eight pieces. Three farms. One harvest each.
We buy small, from three leases we have worked with for years, and we buy the whole lot or none of it. That is why the collection is short and why it changes only once a year.
Three lagoons, named.
Not "the finest farms in the South Pacific." Three specific leases, in three specific places, that we have bought from since 2014, 2016 and 2018 respectively. Each one grows a different animal in different water, and the pearls come out different because of it.
Four notes from the bench.
“I had been putting off buying a strand for four years because I could not tell what I was looking at and did not want to be the person who overpaid. The report answered that. I still do not know much about pearls. I know exactly what I bought.”
“I brought in my grandmother's strand expecting to be sold a new one. They restrung it, replaced two worn pearls with matches I cannot pick out, and charged me less than I have paid for a pair of shoes.”
“Ten months of waiting for two pearls to turn up in the same harvest, with photographs the whole way. They twice told me a pair was not good enough when I would have accepted it.”
“I am thirty-one and pearls felt like something for someone else's generation. The keshi collar changed my mind in about a minute. Nothing about it is delicate.”
Or we make you something that does not exist yet.
About a third of what leaves the atelier was never on this website. Loose pearls we held back, an heirloom strand rebuilt around a broken clasp, a pair of drops matched over a year for someone who was willing to wait. Tell us what it is for and we will tell you honestly whether we can do it and what it will cost.
The things people ask first.
Because we published the whole scale and it is checkable. Read the grading standard, then check any piece against it — the lustre test in particular takes four seconds and needs nothing but a window. And if an independent laboratory disagrees with our report in the first year, we refund the piece and pay for their report.
Cultured, and so is essentially every fine pearl sold anywhere today. Natural pearls — formed without human help — effectively stopped entering the market in the 1930s and now appear at auction rather than in shops. A cultured pearl is grown by the same animal by the same process; a technician gives it the starting point instead of a grain of grit.
Most cultured pearls are a round shell bead with a coat of nacre grown over it. That coat is the pearl. A thick coat gives deep lustre and lasts generations; a thin one looks acceptable in a display case and wears through to the bead. Coat thickness is invisible from the outside, which is precisely why so few sellers mention it.
The actual piece. Every strand and every pair is photographed individually before it is listed, and what arrives is what you saw. The one thing the photograph cannot carry is lustre, which is why we would rather you came in.
Thirty days, for any reason or none, with shipping paid both ways and no restocking fee. Commissioned pieces are the exception and we will say so clearly in the proposal before you accept it.