The most common questions I got when I owned the gallery were about pearls.
- What are the classes of pearls and how are they different?
- What classes of pearls are more expensive? Least expensive?
- What affects the price of pearls?
- What to look for when evaluating pearls?
- What is a cultured pearl? Is it a real pearl?
- What are the various grading systems for pearls? Should I trust them?
People would bring pearls into the gallery for an evaluation. (Although I am certified to do appraisals, I don’t do them for reasons I won’t get into here.) But I could usually tell them a bit more about their pearls than they knew. Especially delightful were times when people brought in pearls they’d inherited from their grandmothers. These often turned out to be Mikimoto pearls bought by a serviceman stationed in Japan after WWII. Although cultured pearls were introduced worldwide in the 1920s and 1930s, it wasn’t until the end of WWII that Americans became thoroughly familiar with them. And, you might be interested to know that this development echoed one which occurred in Europe during the Crusades when knights brought pearls home for their wives and daughters.
In any event, I still get questions about pearls from people who are anxious to know enough about them to buy confidently, but don’t want to spend the time to research them.
So I took the plunge and developed a little pamphlet about the subject I’m calling “Fast Facts About Pearls.” The book presents everything you need to know about this marvelous gemstone to buy confidently or to evaluate the pearls you already own. Information is presented in pyramid form, that is, the most important information first followed by information that is nice to know.
I hope people will find that it’s a useful reference that they can refer to when buying and/or caring for a strand of pearls. For professional pearl and bead stringers, I believe it might serve as a useful reference for discussing the subject with clients and for buying your own inventory.
The book is priced at $.99 and I uploaded it to Kindle last week. If you’re at all interested, click this link to go to Kindle and take a look at it. And, if you do spend the dollar, please consider a review.
BTW, the image on the cover was extracted from a painting my husband and I bought just after our honeymoon. We were dead broke, but somehow cobbled together the funds to buy it. I’ve loved it for more than 30 years. It’s called “The Buyer” and I did have fun using it in this context.
