Why Pearls Are Expensive | $1.5 Million South Sea Pearls from Pearl Paradise

Wow, what a nice strand of pearl. Oh my hot, ever-living biscuits. $25,000 versus $1.5 million. The difference in value is literally astronomical. Today, we're going to be talking about the most important value factor in pearls. Luster is king. If you're buying pearls, you want to stand out, you want it to glow. That's all about the luster. Joining us today is Jeremy Shepherd, owner of Pearl Paradise, founder of pearlguide.com, and co-author of CPAA's Pearls as One online educational course. And we're going to be examining what makes a million-dollar pearl strand, as well as comparing it to other fine strands to train your eye for pearl connoisseurship. Jeremy is going to be showing us some once-in-a-lifetime pearls today of the South Sea, Akoya, and freshwater varieties. Be sure to watch this video all the way through. This is going to blow your mind. You want me to jump right into the goodies? These are all lined up in terms of luster. So yeah, I've got some really special South Sea strands today. It's a private collection of South Sea strands. Because we don't typically have pearls this crazy, I thought this would be a great time to come back on with Jordan and show you. We're going to come back to this. But first, a little education. Pearl learning, if you will. Pearl-ducation. Pearlploration. South Sea pearls are a type of saltwater pearl, known for their large size and distinctly satiny silver and gold colors. Pearls are categorized as either natural or cultured, with over 99% of pearls on the market being cultured, meaning farmed. And within both these categories, pearls can be either freshwater or saltwater. The common consensus is that South Sea pearls are the most valuable of all pearls. Jeremy is going to reveal today whether or not that is actually true. Unless you're talking about rare naturals, yes, common pearls can be much more expensive. Mellow mellow pearls can be much more expensive. But if you're talking about farmed pearls, cultured pearls, the pearls you see in jewelry stores, you know, from anywhere from Tiffany's to Mickey Moto, it doesn't really matter. Those are all cultured pearls, of course. So there's four categories, general categories of pearls. You've got freshwater pearls, Akoya pearls, Tahitian pearls, and South Sea pearls. South Sea pearls are like the Rolls Royce of pearls. Freshwater pearls, you'd almost call them like the Honda Accord. You know, they're nice, they're great, but it's not a Rolls Royce, right? South Sea pearls also only grow one pearl at a time in the oysters. And with freshwater pearls, you can grow up to 16 pearls on either valve. So you can grow up to 32 pearls in one freshwater mussel. South Sea pearls, not only are they grown one at a time, they're grown in some of the most remote areas of Australia and Indonesia and the Philippines. Australian farms, Pass Bailey's Farm, for example, up in Currie Bay is northwest of Australia. There's no roads to get there, there's no cities, there's no communities. And so the farms are actually run off ships. We're going back to those fine South Sea strands to compare their quality and value by examining their luster. Please remain calm. You might want to sit down for this. If you pass out from awe, it's okay. The most important thing is that you let me know in the comments. One of the highest quality strand of pearls I've actually ever seen in South Sea. You know, South Sea pearls, and we're going to be talking a lot about luster today, but South Sea pearls don't tend to have that, like, mirror-like metallic luster that you'll sometimes see in Akoya pearls. Once in a while, you'll see in freshwater pearls, sometimes you'll see in Tahitian pearls as well. South Sea pearls tend to have more of a satiny, softer luster. The biggest they usually come is, you know, 18, 19, sometimes as much as 20 millimeters. The oysters that produce Pintada maxima are big. They're like the size of a dinner plate. The nacre that they lay down has really thick aragonite platelets. And so it creates this sort of soft, satiny luster that's very unique to South Sea pearls. Some people love that satiny luster, but other people kind of want that high luster you'll see in Akoya pearls, also in South Sea pearls. But it's really, really hard to come by. This is like more of a satiny type luster. You know, they're round. They have what we would consider pretty good luster for a strand of South Seas. And this particular strand is, I think, 14 to just over 17 millimeters in the center. That is a almost standard strand of South Sea pearls, you might want to call it. And then you get up to this. $1,584,000 for this strand. So this is luster as good as it gets. The previous strand, which is almost the same size with lower luster, it's a 17 millimeter strand that's about $25,000. Sweet whistling Geronimo. See, the difference in the luster is really clear when you look at the reflection of the light here. High luster will have very clearly defined reflections of light. Lower luster starts to get a little bit fuzzier around the light. And also, if you look really closely in these pearls here, you can actually make out the camera. You can make out the shape of the light. You can make out differences in the background, the wall, etc. Luster is really the measurement of what's the quantity and the quality of light that's reflected from the surface of the pearl or just under the surface of the pearl. And that's an important point because the light travels through the layers of nacre. Some of the light will reflect from the surface of the pearl. So it will reflect from the surface of the pearl. It'll bounce up and then other light will penetrate layers of nacre under the nacre and then bounce up. Basically, when the light bends and then another, you know, wave of photons or whatever diffracts and bends, the light crosses each other. And so it's called thin film interference. And it creates this sort of like rainbow effect, an oil slick effect, also called orient, which is considered a very rare feature in saltwater pearls. But the finest of the fine pearls have beautiful orient like that South Sea Strand is. These are 17.2. And I'm showing this just because it's the best pair of South Sea pearls I have personally ever seen in my life. And I've seen a lot of pearls, Jordan. And that is to go with this strand. This strand is the same size and it has the same color. It's got white, pink. The other one seems to have a bit more silver. What we're really seeing is the orient. It's really pouring out of the super high end strand. This one is white, pink, still a very, very high end collection strand, you know, over 18 millimeters in the center. Still a six figure strand. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference between those two strands. You may have seen pearls graded from sellers as A, AA, AAA. Jeremy and I dive into exactly what that means in our video, How Not to Buy Pearls. But don't watch it yet. Watch this video first, because we need to know, Are there luster grading standards for pearls? None. Zero. Grading is such a misnomer because it is completely, completely subjective. You know, I'll show you some more strands here just to give you an idea. These are all South Sea strands that are, they range from about 16 to the largest is about 20, 20 millimeters. OK, you can see that. These strands also range from about $80,000 up to just under a million dollars for another one of these super strands. But this time it's silver instead of white pink. This is the first strand that we we looked at just a moment ago. And this is out of all the strands, the one that I would say has the lowest luster. And, you know, I'll say lowest luster, but it's still a fine strand of South Sea pearls. This strand jumps up about a single point in luster. And you can actually start to see this because you can start to see the fuzziness around the light reflections start to disappear. And this particular pearl, 19.9 millimeters. Massive. They really don't get any larger than this. It really is just about as big as you can get in in South Seas at, you know, 20 millimeters here, 20 millimeters center with two 18 millimeter shoulders there. It's crazy. Back to the luster here. Another strand up. The color is is white with a slight rose to it. The next strand has even slightly better luster. When I say slightly better luster, you can really barely make it out. And the only way you can really see the difference in luster is when you're comparing them side by side. That slight difference just makes a dramatic, tremendous difference in value. So then this luster on this strand is just about as high as it gets. In fact, with this, I would call it the nine out of 10. And then you get into these two. And these two are museum grade strands. They just really don't get any better than this. I can clearly see my reflection. I can see my my finger reflecting on the surface as I run it by. I can actually looking at it from an angle here. I can see my face reflected in it. It just doesn't get any better than that. The impact of luster. Well, it's everything. It's headlights versus a nightlight in your closet really is what we're talking about. And that's the range. In our last video that we did, we talked about grading. And so often you'll see for luster, it'll just say good or great luster or excellent luster. But that spectrum is rough. Jeez. You can have a spectrum that goes from dull all the way up to mirror, where it's like you're looking at a mirror when you're looking at the pearls in the highest luster. So if you were to get really, really granular, you could be looking at 50 plus different luster grades. And so quantifying that and just like this is a double A luster or something like that, really just it doesn't mean anything. I promised you a comparison between high luster Akoyas and South Seas. Let's dive in to the quality and value of Akoya and freshwater pearls and understand how they compare to South Sea pearls. So here's two strands of Akoya pearls. The larger strand has really, really fine nacre. And the smaller strand has, I would call it sort of a soft, medium nacre. It's not poor. You're not seeing the bead, but you can definitely see that the luster is not as deep. It's not as reflective. This I would consider a very fine, very fine luster. So this is considered, you know, a fine South Sea strand, a six figure strand. It's about $200,000. Now with the Akoya pearls, again, we were talking about the reflection there. They're like little mirrors. If we were to zoom in right here, you would actually see all the lighting behind me. You'd even see me from the angle. South Seas, you can see slightly more subdued and subtle. Let's grab the super fine strand of South Seas. See that you're starting to get the same level of luster. And this is what really makes the South Sea strand so special is it has the luster of a fine, fine quality strand of Akoya pearls. This is a strand of what we call metallic, metallic freshwater pearls. And I've got some other metallics here as well. Some soufflés and such that I'll show you in a moment. But if you can see this, these are freshwater pearls. They're slightly off round, ever so slightly. Getting metallic luster in freshwater and getting round is extraordinarily difficult to do. More typical freshwater luster, the non-metallic actually has a better shape. So it's quite easy for us to find freshwater strands that are really round. Round with that luster, not quite as easy. These are soufflé pearls. And you can see that, again, the luster is just phenomenal. And they've got that orient, too, that changes the colors. You can see like this pearl, for example. It looks like it's silver with gold around the edges. But then you turn it, now silver's in the front. You know, and now from this angle, it looks almost totally gold. You know, with freshwater pearls especially, baroque is the least valuable. There are up to 1500 metric tons of freshwater pearls produced in a year, okay? The vast majority of these pearls are baroque. If you want to go baroque, you're going to go with something like... If you're looking for value in baroque, this is a baroque strand. But that's a 20 millimeter south sea strand. 20 millimeters in the center, 16 to 20. And that's diameter. So the length is probably up to about 25 millimeters on some of these pearls. You can kind of see how the soufflé is compared to this. This is a very, very valuable baroque strand. This is what we would call a freeform shape, freeform south sea strand. Another Australian strand. And yeah, this strand would be much, much more expensive than a strand of soufflé pearls like this. If you haven't already, please smash that like button and comment below your reaction to these museum grade pearls that Jeremy's showing us. And be sure to visit pearlguide.com to learn more about pearl types, treatments, sustainability, and more.