The look of creamy, softly shining white pearls creates such a definite look. Pearls are class, they’re vintage charm, they’re the rosewater and jasmine smell of your Nana. Equally beautiful, but in a spicy, bracing sort of way, are black pearls.

True black pearls come from a species of oyster called Pinctada Maragitifera, also known as a black lipped oyster. It’s a simple genetic difference that makes these oysters create pearls with a black, rather than white hue. This species of oyster lives around Tahiti, Kiribati and the Cook Islands, so the term black pearl is used interchangeably with Tahitian pearls often.

Oddly enough, black pearls can be almost white in color! It’s one of those annoying tricks of biologists, whereby a ‘black snake’ is most often gray, and ‘green tree frogs’ are often dappled and camouflaged.

Before the development of peal culturing techniques, black pearls were extremely rare … about as rare as an albino person. Only one in ten thousand pearls discovered was a black pearl. And even ten thousand natural pearls took a fair bit of time and effort to get! T he black pearls that actually look black sit towards the silver end of the scale, while deeper colored black pearls, and therefore more valuable ones, are a purplish-green hue. Sort of like an oil slick on the road, only much more elegant!

Baroque Tahitian Pearl Bracelet

While black pearls have certainly become much more affordable than the $15,000 that a single gem was once worth, they are still up the luxury end of the scale! One cost-effective way to buy them is as Baroque Tahitian Pearls, slightly off round pieces that have an artistically individual effect.

Another bonus of buying black pearls is that the larger diameters are much more common. Where the oysters that produce Akoya Pearls are rarely capable of developing anything more than 8mm in diameter, simply because of their size (it would be like a tiny Japanese lady having a 13 pound African baby!), black lipped oysters are much bigger. Their size allows the pearls to grow up to 12mm frequently.