10 Most Expensive Pearls Ever Discovered — #1 Is Priceless

One of history's most famous pearls was found in the mouth of a Hollywood star's puppy. Another vanished during a revolution, only to resurface decades later with its identity forgotten. And one royal pearl survived the downfall of a queen before triggering a bidding war that stunned the jewelry world. These treasures passed through the hands of royalty, disappeared for generations, and eventually sold for millions. But here's the mystery. Even the most expensive pearl ever sold isn't number one. Nine of these treasures have actual auction prices. The last has something no amount of money can measure. And our countdown begins with an imperial jewel hidden from the world for more than 75 years. Number 10. The Habsburg-Devant-De-Corsage. Our story begins in Vienna, in the Age of Empires. In 1865, Philip, Duke of Württemberg, married Archduchess Marie Therese. Of Austria Teschen, a member of the Habsburg dynasty. His wedding gift to her was a devant de corsage, a large ornament designed to be worn across the front of a gown's bodice, exactly where every eye in a ballroom would land. It was built as a wreath of diamond flowers. At its center hangs a drop-shaped pearl, supporting three more pearl drops, while button-shaped pearls glow at the heart of the surrounding blossoms. The whole thing could even be taken apart, so the central flower could be worn alone as a brooch. Every one of those pearls is natural, and that word matters for everything that follows. Today, nearly all pearls are cultured. They're genuine pearls, but they form after a pearl farmer places a nucleus inside a mollusk. A natural pearl forms entirely by chance, with no human help, and before And before cultured pearls reached the market in the early 20th century, finding a large, well-shaped one meant opening an enormous number of shells. The ornament's maker was Emil Biedermann, one of the two jewelers named to the imperial court after the revolutions of 1848. Even among his Habsburg commissions, this piece stands out as one of his most ambitious. But the most remarkable part of its story is where it spent the 20th century. In 1946, a It was placed in a German bank vault, along with the rest of a collection of more than 200 pieces, and there it stayed, unseen, for more than 75 years. When Sotheby's brought the rediscovered collection to Geneva in 2023, every single lot sold. The corsage ornament, estimated at up to 450,000 Swiss francs, reached roughly 1.1 million francs, about $1.2 million. A jewel that disappears for generations can return more desirable than when it left. Number 9. Marie Antoinette's Three-Strand Necklace The Habsburg jewels survived by being hidden. Our next pearls survived by escaping. By early 1791, the French Revolution was closing in on the royal family. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were secretly planning to flee Paris. According to her lady-in-waiting, the queen spent an evening at the Tuileries Palace wrapping her diamonds, rubies, and pearls in cotton and packing them into a wooden chest. Letters she wrote that winter mention a box of her jewels heading to a trusted ally, the Count of Mercy Argento, the former Austrian ambassador to France, who was waiting in Brussels. The jewels made it out. The family did not. In June 1791, they were caught at Varennes and brought back to Paris. Within three years, both the King and Queen had been executed. Among the treasures in that chest were the Queen's natural pearls, including a necklace that would eventually be worn as three strands. More than two centuries later, it appeared at Sotheby's in Geneva with 119 natural pearls And a diamond clasp added in the 20th century. It sold for 2,295,000 Swiss francs, about 2.28 million dollars. That is a staggering sum for a necklace of modest-sized pearls. It reflects something the pearl market pays for again and again, a direct, documented connection to one of history's most famous women. But here is the twist. That same night, a jewel from the very same chest sold for more than 15 times as much. We'll return to it near the top of this countdown. Marie Antoinette's pearls never lost their name. Our next pearl did. Number 8. La Régente. Napoleon Bonaparte bought a spectacular pearl for his second wife, the Empress Marie-Louise. It was an oval drop weighing 302.68 grains. Pearls are weighed in grains, and four grains make one carat, so this single pearl weighs more than 75 carats and measures more than an inch long. Decades later, Napoleon's nephew, Emperor Napoleon III, had it set into a jewel for his own bride, the Empress Eugénie. Then the empire collapsed in 1870. In 1887, the French government auctioned off most of the old crown jewels, and at that sale the pearl received the name it carries today, La Régente. It was bought on behalf of the Yusupovs, one of the richest families in Imperial Russia. Princess Zinaida Yusupova's personal jewel collection was considered second only to the treasures in the Romanov Imperial Vaults. Then came 1917. As revolution swept across Russia, her son, Prince Felix Yusupov, the man infamous for his role in the murder of Rasputin, hid the family's jewels inside their homes in St. Petersburg and Moscow. The family fled. The hiding places didn't hold. In 1925, the Bolsheviks discovered the Moscow cache beneath a staircase. What happened to La Regente over the next six decades is far from clear. When it finally resurfaced at Christie's in 1987, the catalog described it with little more than a Russian provenance. One of the great pearls of the French Empire had come back into the world almost anonymous. Over the following years, its identity was reconnected to its past, and it changed hands at auction more than once. When Christie's Geneva offered it again in 2005, now with its imperial story restored, it sold for about $2.5 million. At the time a record for a single pearl, La Regente never changed. Its size, its shape, and its luster were the same in 1987 as in 2005. What changed was how much of its story could be told, and in the pearl market, a documented past is a large part of what bidders are competing for. Number 7. The Empresses of the Orient. La Regente's value rests on one extraordinary pearl. Now imagine needing four of them, and needing them to match. In November 2013, Chris Christie's Hong Kong offered a pair of earrings nicknamed the Empresses of the Orient. Each earring holds two natural white pearls, a round button pearl at the top, nearly 14mm across, and a pear-shaped drop below it, about 18mm long, joined by a diamond cap. Here's the problem with natural pearls. Every one is an accident of nature. Finding a single, large, well-shaped specimen is difficult enough. Finding a second that matches it in size, shape, color, and luster can take years. These earrings required two perfect... The Swiss Gemological Institute attached a special note to its report, describing a set like this as very rare and exceptional. They sold for about $3.35 million, a world auction record for natural pearl earrings, and that record was barely six months old. Earlier that year in Geneva, the record for natural pearl earrings had been broken on two consecutive nights. Hong Kong left both results far behind. Matching four natural pearls is difficult. Now imagine matching 42, in a color most people never associate with pearls at all. 6. The Cowdray Pearls Ask most people to picture a priceless pearl necklace, and they'll imagine something white. The Cowdray Pearls are grey. They are 42 natural saltwater pearls, ranging through shades of silver grey and brown, with subtle overtones of pink, purple, and green. They once belonged to Annie Pearson, Viscountess Cowdray, a celebrated English collector who died in 1932. The strand was mounted by Cartier, and when it first came to auction at Sotheby's London in 1937, the catalogue claimed there was probably no finer collection of such pearls anywhere. Natural grey saltwater pearls rarely appear at auction at all. Gathering 42 that agree with one another, when every pearl carries its own shifting undertones, is a far subtler challenge than matching white. But the necklace has a secret. At some point, while the Cowdray family owned it, The strand was shortened to 38 pearls, and some of the removed pearls were made into a pair of earrings. In 2012, the shortened necklace sold at Christie's London for $3.35 million, a record for natural gray pearls. After that sale, the necklace was rebuilt to its original length of 42. Two of the original pearls went back onto the strand, along with two pearls taken from another antique jewel. Before its next sale, Sotheby's sent the restored necklace on a world tour, from New York and London to Geneva, Singapore and Taipei. So when the Cowdray pearls came to Sotheby's Hong Kong in 2015, they were not entirely the same necklace that Lady Cowdray had worn. It didn't matter. They sold for about $5.3 million, beating their own record by nearly $2 million. The Cowdray Pearls prove that rarity isn't about whiteness or perfection. It's about how difficult something is to assemble, and how few people on earth could ever assemble it again. But one of the great royal collections of India once held a necklace made on an even grander scale. Number 5. The Baroda Pearls For centuries, pearls from the Persian Gulf flowed east, into the treasuries of India's royal courts. And few rulers collected them with more ambition than Sayajirao Gaekwad, the 19th century Maharaja of Baroda. Among his treasures was a necklace of seven strands of natural pearls, perfectly matched and graduated from one end to the other. It became the centerpiece of the Baroda treasury. The American gemologist George Frederick Kunz, who examined the Baroda holdings in the early 20th century, described them as Among the greatest jeweled treasures in India, he reportedly valued the seven-strand necklace alone at around half a million dollars, an enormous sum at the time. The necklace passed through later generations of the royal family. In the 20th century, it came to Maharani Sita Devi, who received the great jewels of the Baroda treasury upon her marriage. Many of those jewels were eventually sold, and the seven-strand necklace did not survive in its original form. What came to Christie's New York in April 2007 was a fragment of that masterpiece. Sixty-eight of the largest pearls, drawn from the fourth through the seventh strands of the original, had been restrung into two rows and joined with a cushion-shaped diamond clasp by Cartier. The pearls ran from roughly 10 to 16 millimeters, matched in color, luster, and shape. The bidding lasted about three minutes. The winner, a private Asian collector on the phone, Paid about $7.1 million. That was more than double the previous world record for any natural pearl jewel. Think about what that means. The buyer wasn't purchasing the legendary Baroda necklace. They were purchasing part of it, the surviving heart of something that could never be reassembled. And even as a fragment, it was worth more than any pearl necklace that had ever been sold. That record belonged to a royal name. Just six years later, a necklace with no famous name at all would surpass it. Number four, the record single strand. In May 2013, Christie's Geneva held a sale whose headline lot was a flawless 101 carat diamond. It sold for nearly $27 million. But the second highest price of the evening went to something much quieter. A single strand of natural pearls. There was no queen attached to it. No Maharaja. No escape from a revolution. The catalog's appeal rested on the pearls themselves. Graduated from about 13.7 millimeters at the center, down to about 10.4 at the ends. That may not sound dramatic, In a single strand, every pearl sits beside its neighbors, and any mismatch in color, shape, or luster shows immediately. Each pearl must step down in size so smoothly that the eye never catches the change. Building that from natural pearls means waiting, sometimes for decades, for exactly the right pearl to surface. An anonymous buyer paid $8,457,945, a world auction record for a single-strand natural pearl necklace. It beat the Baroda Pearls by well over over a million dollars, with half as many rows, and assembling another strand like it would be extraordinarily difficult. In the 20th century, cultured pearls flooded the market, and the great natural pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf faded away. Fine natural pearls of this size now come almost entirely from old jewels and collections. When a strand like this surfaces, collectors know they may wait years for another. This strand proves something important. A perfect natural necklace can become a major collector's object entirely. Number 3. La Peregrina In the 16th century, a pearl was found in the waters of the Gulf of Panama, then part of Spain's empire in the Americas. It was large, natural, and shaped like a nearly perfect pear. It was sent to Spain and presented to King Philip II. For more than two centuries, it remained among the Spanish royal jewels. Spanish queens wore it in their official portraits. A popular story claims Philip first gave it to his English wife, Mary Tudor. But historians point out that Spanish records first document the pearl in 1579, After Mary's death, the pearl in her famous portraits appears to be a different one. Richard Burton, who believed the Tudor story, even bought a portrait of Mary to go with it, and the couple later donated that painting to Britain's National Portrait Gallery. In 1808, Napoleon's armies invaded Spain, and the pearl left the country with the French. It eventually passed to Napoleon III, who, while living in exile in England, sold it to James Hamilton, later the Duke of Abercorn. By then, it had a name, La Peregrina, the Wanderer. The Wanderer was far from... The program finished. In 1969, it came up for auction, and the actor Richard Burton bought it for $37,000, reportedly outbidding a member of the Spanish royal family. He gave it to Elizabeth Taylor that February. Not long afterward, Taylor reached for the pearl in a hotel suite and found it gone. By her own account, she discovered it in the mouth of one of her puppies, who had been quietly chewing on it. The pearl was unharmed. In 1972, Taylor worked with Al Durante of Cartier to design a new setting for it, an of pearls, diamonds, and rubies with La Peregrina hanging at the bottom. It's worth noting that this necklace included cultured pearls alongside the natural ones. After Taylor's death, the necklace was offered at Christie's New York in December 2011 with an estimate of two to three million dollars. It sold for $11,842,500. That number needs care. It's the price of the entire Cartier necklace, not an appraisal of La Peregrina alone. But no one doubts which part of that necklace The bidders were fighting over. A pearl bought for $37,000 had become the heart of a nearly $12 million jewel. La Peregrina traveled from a Spanish king to a Hollywood star. But our next pearl had to survive something far more dangerous before it could reach the auction room. Number 2. Marie Antoinette's Pearl Pendant Remember the wooden chest Marie Antoinette packed in 1791? From Brussels, its contents traveled on to Vienna, into the care of the Austrian emperor, the queen's own nephew. While her parents went to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette's teenage daughter, Marie Thérèse, remained imprisoned in Paris. She was the only one of the king and queen's children to survive the revolution. In 1795, she was finally released. The following year, she arrived in Vienna, Among them was a pendant, a diamond bow set with an oval diamond, supporting a slightly baroque, drop-shaped natural pearl, measuring about 26 by 18 millimeters. A family inventory from 1907 records that it once hung from the queen's three-strand pearl necklace, the same necklace we met at number nine. When Marie Therese died in 1851, she left a third of her jewels, including this pendant, to her niece, Louise, the Duchess of Parma. For roughly the next 200 years, the pieces stayed with the Bourbon Parma family. Out of public view. Then. Sotheby's Geneva offered more than 100 jewels from the family's collection, including 10 pieces that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. The pendant carried an estimate of 1 to 2 million Swiss francs. That was a serious figure for a single pearl jewel, but nothing about it hinted at what was coming. Bidders from around the world fought over it until the final price reached 36,427,000 Swiss francs, about $36.17 million. It was the highest price ever. ever paid at auction for a natural pearl, and roughly 18 times the top of its estimate. Sotheby's jewelry chairman summed up the night by crediting what she called the Marie Antoinette factor. That phrase explains the gap. The pearl is large and beautiful, but natural pearls of similar size do appear on the market. What could not appear anywhere else was this exact object, packed among a doomed queen's jewels, preserved through a revolution, reclaimed by her only surviving child and kept hidden for two centuries. $36 million is the... highest price any pearl has ever reached in this countdown. So what could possibly rank above it? The answer is a pearl that no one has ever put a price on. Number 1. The Abu Dhabi Pearl. Off the coast of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, lies a low, sandy place called Marawa Island. In 1992, a survey of the region's islands identified Neolithic sites there. Over the years that followed, archaeologists uncovered the remains of collapsed The earliest architecture ever found in the country, and in the floor of one of those ancient rooms, they found a pearl. It does not look like much. It's small, less than a centimeter long, and it has none of the dazzling, mirror-like luster of the pearls we've met so far. If you saw it in a jewelry store, you might walk right past it. The site around it held flint arrowheads, beads of shell and stone, and a ceramic vessel imported from the Ubaid culture of ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. Researchers believe pearls from these waters may have been traded for pottery and other goods and were likely worn as jewelry. Then, in 2019, Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism announced the date. The layers of earth the pearl came from had been radiocarbon dated to between 5800 and 5600 BCE. That makes the Abu Dhabi pearl roughly 8,000 years old, and it was presented as the oldest known natural pearl in the world. Every story in this countdown, from Philip II to Marie Antoinette, The pearl trade that would one day fill the treasuries of Indian Maharajas May have roots reaching back to the Stone Age. That evidence is what makes it priceless, in the most literal sense. The Abu Dhabi authorities themselves described it that way. It has never been sold, and it has no auction estimate. It belongs to the collection of the Zayed National Museum, and when it was first shown to the public, it went on display at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. We can't claim it would outsell Marie Antoinette's pendant. No one can. But we can say this. If it were lost, nothing could replace it. You could find another pearl of the same size and the same appearance tomorrow. You could never find another pearl that lay in that particular floor 8,000 years ago and told us what this one tells us. Outro sum. So, why isn't a $36 million pearl number one? Because a price measures desire at a single moment, in a single room, it tells us what a handful of people were willing to pay for beauty, rarity, and a famous name. The Abu Dhabi pearl measures something else. How long human beings have looked at a pearl and decided it was worth keeping. Ma- Marie Antoinette's pendant is the most expensive pearl ever sold. The Abu Dhabi pearl takes us closer to the beginning of humanity's love of pearls than almost any pearl ever discovered. Which pearl would you rather see with your own eyes? Tell us in the comments!