Just as diamonds can be evaluated by their 4c’s, there are six ways to evaluate the quality of your pearl.

A pearl’s color can be determined by three components: body color, overtone, and orient.

Different oyster varieties affect the color of the pearl. For example, the golden and silver-lipped oysters in Australia and Indonesia produce the golden and silver-colored South Sea pearls.

Pearls also come in a rainbow of warm and cool colors. Warm body colors such as cream, golden, white, and silver are common with Akoya and South Sea pearls. Cool body colors such as blue, green, violet, and black are common with Tahitian pearls. Some of these fancy colored pearls have exotic names such as apricot, champagne, aubergine, peacock and pistachio.

High quality nacre is durable and has excellent or good luster. The uniformity and alignment of the nacre layers are important, as well as the thickness and translucence.

For nacre to be of high quality, it must have a good combination of these factors. High translucence is important because it permits better refraction and reflection of light – all ingredients of luster.

A pearl with poor nacre will appear chalky, dull and whitish.

All of Spencer & Spencer’s pearls have high quality nacre.

A pearl with excellent luster will look bright and shiny. The sharper the reflection of light is on a pearl, the higher the luster.

South Sea cultured pearls tend to have a soft, satiny luster, whereas fine Akoya cultured pearls have a bright, mirror-like gloss.

Because pearl-bearing mollusks are sensitive, the most lustrous pearls are from mollusks in cooler waters, stress-free and pollution-free environments. Spencer & Spencer only works with pearl farmers who value a clean environment and maintain these conditions for their mollusks.

The size of a pearl not only depends on the size of the implanted nucleus in an oyster, but also nacre thickness and the size of the mollusk that produced it. A larger mollusk will usually produce a larger pearl.

Pearls are measured in millimeters (mm) and come in different sizes depending on whether they are Akoya, Freshwater, South Sea or Tahitian pearls. All factors being equal, larger pearls are rarer and more valuable than smaller pearls

Round and near-round pearls are generally the rarest and most valuable pearl shape and all of our Akoya pearl earrings and strands are set with round and near-round pearls. Our Freshwater pearl jewelry has pearls that are usually near-round or oval.

With our larger South Sea and Tahitian jewelry, we are proud to be able to offer a variety of shapes and styles to suit your taste and your budget. Not only do we have round and near-round South Sea and Tahitian pearls, but also unique pieces with mabé pearls, circled pearls and oval shaped pearls. All of our pearls are well-shaped and symmetrical and are of the highest quality and all of our strands are perfectly matched.

If there is a particular pearl shape you are looking for and would like assistance with customizing your jewelry, please fill out our custom request form.

All natural gems can have inclusions or blemishes, and pearls are no exception. Cultured pearls are organic, so blemishes or surface characteristics can develop as the oyster is creating the pearl and applying the layers of nacre. A spotless pearl is extremely rare and valuable.

At Spencer & Spencer, we make sure that our pearls have the smoothest surface and least amount of blemishes. We avoid choosing pearls with heavy blemishes and look for pearls with minute surface characteristics that are difficult to see even for a trained gemologist.