Cultured Pearls Collection

By London’s favourite online freshwater pearl retailer

A little something about Cultured Pearls

Cultured pearls were invented by the Japanese Mikimoto as a substitute for very expensive natural pearls. The idea was to entice oysters to grow pearls manually, instead of waiting around for it to happen on its own. Over the years cultured pearls have taken over as the most popular choice for pearl jewellery. Today over 95% of the pearl products on the market are cultured pearls.

There are two types of cultured pearls: freshwater and saltwater. Cultured saltwater pearls tend to be quite a bit more expensive because of the operating costs of saltwater pearl farms. Freshwater pearls remain the dominant player on the cultured pearls market.

CULTURED PEARLS JEWELLERY By Carla Pearls

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How to recognise real pearls?

This is probably one of the most asked questions regarding pearl jewellery. It is actually quite straight forward to tell if a pearl is real or imitated and there are more than one ways. Real pearls tend to have a more tender glow than imitation pearls, which are very shiny. Real pearls are also tender to the touch, they have some bit of weight and are cold like gemstones initially, but warms up to the skin very quickly.

The best way, however, is to gently rub a pearl against your teeth: even though it feels completely smooth while you touch it, the pearl would give you a grainy or sandy quality against your teeth. Another tell-tale sign is when you slightly scrath a real pearl, there will be a little trace of power on the surface. When you wipe it the power will disappear and the surface will show no evidence of the scratching at all.

About Carla Pearls

The London based Carla Pearls (operated by Carla Jewellery UK Ltd.) is an online pearl retailer with excellent reputation, and serves customers from all over the UK as well as rest of the World. The website is available in both English and French.

Carla pearls offers dispatch within 24 hours and delivery within 1-3 working days for anywhere in the UK free of charge, and with a minimum cost for orders outside the UK. As well as a 14-day cooling off period where you can return your purchase with no questions asked (provided that item is not damaged).

Discover more Pearl Jewellery at Carla Pearls >

Cultured pearl is probably the most adored element for choice of jewellery making. They are beautiful, classy, gorgeous, and affordable for most people. Cultured pearls are divided in two kinds, freshwater pearl and saltwater pearl, depending on the environment where the pearl is grown. Pearl jewellery come in many forms, pearl necklace and pearl earrings are probably the most popular and most seen, followed by pearl bracelet and pearl rings. Many women prefer pearl necklace and pearl earrings to pearl bracelet and pearl ring, simply because pearls are fragile beings, and being made into a bracelet means they come often in contact with chemicals such as perfume, hand wash, hand cream, and many others – much more exposed to ‘dangerous’ elements than pearls. Unless you are committed to be very protective of your pearls and take them off when you are touching chemicals that might damage their lustre, it is probably better just to have pearl necklace and earrings. There is nothing more painful than seeing your pearls loosing lustre because you accidentally dampened it by acid hand wash! The damage made to pearls lustre is irreversible. Indeed, pearls are much more fragile than any other gemstones, as they were grown, not ‘mined’. That is also why pearls have such special charm, because they are a gemstone with souls. Search ‘taking care of your pearls’ topic on google and you can find many articles offering advice on how to take care of your pearls. Pearls are a living and breathing being as much as you are, and it is important to appreciate this.

Cultured pearls are a fantastic alternative to natural pearls, which are invariably much more expensive than cultured pearls. In fact nowadays 99% of the pearl products that you can find on the market are cultured pearls – even if the merchant might claim them to be ‘natural pearls’. Also natural pearls are usually presented in much more irregular shapes than cultured pearls as we have zero control over what shapes the pearls turn out to be. Most of the natural pearls are either flat, baroque or of other irregular shapes, perfect round pearls are extremely hard to find and therefore very expensive. In a way, cultured pearls are a real blessing for women today as they make it possible for them to enjoy pearls at affordable prices.

A lot of people wonder why pearl pendant, bearing one single pearl, usually cost just as much as a whole strand of pearls. The reason behind this is, pearls used in pendant must be larger than in a strand, and they need to be perfect – perfectly round with no surface flaw. In a strand, if a pearl has a bit of flaw, the jeweller can drill through the flaw bit and hide it with stringing, whereas this is not possible if the pearl has to be presented by itself. Therefore, pearls used in pendants are always of much higher quality rating than pearls in strands. One thing particular in pearls is, as the size and quality rating increase, the price increases very fast, this is essentially because it gets much harder to get good shape and surface quality in bigger pearls. The price for a 9mm size pearl can double that of a 8mm, and anything around 10mm are easily double the price of a 9mm pearl.