This year’s hottest fashion trend is as wet as the UK summer has been so far. #CoastalGrandmother has morphed into mermaidcore. Well..I live by the coast and I am a grandmother, so I quite liked the coastal grandmother trend. Think neutrals, especially beige tones from vanilla to coffee.Natural fibres, loose fitting and simply comfy. The sort of clothes you would wear to go beachcombing for shells or seaglass if you were a jeweller (ahem!) Add the shells, seaweed and beachy stuff of #mermaidcore to the beige and whites of of the coast – venture onto the sands and clamber over the rock pools to ..read more

A Tokki pearl is a type of pearl you will either love or hate. Love for its unique form and character, or hate and despise as something not perfect and of no value. Tokki pearls are sea pearls with distinctive knobbles (which can either be solid or hollow and which are usually a keishi pearl which has formed inside the pearl sac and therefore stuck to the cultured pearl. This little chap sits on my PC screen and has done for years. He’s a blue baroque south sea pearl with darker blue ‘eyes’. I came across him several years ago now in Hong Kong. That same trip I found and was entranced by some ..read more

Every so often we get a phone call and find ourselves strapping blue flashing lights to our heads and shouting whoop-whoop noises. That happened last Friday when, around lunch-time, we had a call from someone who wanted a present for a 100th birthday. The party was the next day (Saturday). Okkkkkay. Eventually we agreed that it would be perfect – and faster – to make a necklace from scratch using a magnetic clasp instead of re-making an existing stock item. Wendy’s fingers flew along a strand of 8mm AAA metallic luster round natural coloured multi coloured pearls, with an easy to use silver an ..read more

It’s been two years to the day since I got back from my usual Spring buying trip to Hong Kong. The trip had been great, even if I had spent most of every day behind a mask and had washed my hands more in ten days than in the previous month. Ah Hong Kong I miss you. View from Tsim Shah TSui across to the Island. Note the classic junk sailing majestically past. This photo also shows the classic faint fug which is often mistying Hong Kong, and also how the buildings are all along the shoreline, while the island is mostly steep woodland. Hong Kong is mostly…up. Yes, Covid had arrived in Hong Kong ..read more

That some freshwater pearls fade has long been an anecdotal factoid. Now it is confirmed as a factual fact. The Summer issue of the GIA (Gemological Institute of America) magazine contained a long technical report on their examination of some Edison and other non-branded bead nucleated freshwater pearls which were supplied to them by The Edison Pearl Company (Grace Pearl) HQ’d in Zhuji. Bead nucleated freshwater pearls (BNFW) are a comparatively recent innovation in the farmed pearl market. They appeared at the end of 2010 with an initial auction in 2011. Most of them were then what are now ca ..read more

Such a simple look. A white round pearl rope, but brought to a perfect length for the outfit and jazzed up with an over hand knot. There’s nothing more to say, but stand back and admire. The post Hillary Clinton – fabulous pearl style appeared first on Pearlescence ..read more

We’ve done a slow, under-the-radar sort of launch for our Kintsugi collection of repaired ‘broken pearls’ but now is the time to tell all. Maybe three years ago I was at a Hong Kong Gem Show and discovered the existence of broken pearls after finding a bag of all sorts of non-mainstream pearls at the back of a tiny stall featuring a mix of different sea pearls. Gold, white and blue South Sea ‘broken’ pearls. Great colour and lustre. Intrigued, I sat down and started to go through the bag (it had well over a thousand pearls in it). There were tiny little round gold and white and pink, and blu ..read more

Covid has affected us. But I also have some exciting news about new stock of Robert Wan Tahitian pearls. During lockdown here in the UK I worked alone to keep things going and now we are very much a ‘face mask and wash your hands please’ place. So far the horrible virus hasn’t managed to get to us.  The government is re-opening everything far too quickly so we have decided we are going to carry on being reclusive and very very careful. We hope you understand if that means some delays to shipping and making of custom orders. The other big problem is that, while I went to Hong Kong in Feb/M ..read more

  Our new packaging. Light card and printed ribbon. One of the few good things about the whole covid thing has been that there has been a little time for reflection outside the hurly-burly pressure of the everyday routine. Once we here had adapted to the interregnum of being confined to homes (basically everyone stayed home except me and I went back to the early days and did everything!) I did have time to think about some aspects of how we do things. Stay with me and (I hope) follow my thinking. It’s very clear that decimating flying has had a positive effect on the environment. At the ..read more

I offer today an abject apology to would be readers..in a whirl of Instagram, twitter and facebook my posting to this blog sadly slipped and slipped. And I also apologise because this is going to be a bit of a rant. With a little time on my hands I spotted a pearl selling programme on a TV gem selling channel. Can I please make very clear that these are grade D tahitians. This is not a perfect pearl. Not round, not metallic and certainly not clean. note the huge flaws clearly visible on their studio demo pearl What has me writing this is the claim that pearl professionals are buying these pe ..read more