[Zeide Erskine]

Hi WoodyCox,

Strange as it may sound the information you got is all correct. The large pinctada mussels are biologically not as distinct as jewelers may want to make it look like and they can even interbreed which means they are more closely related than horses and zebras.

However, we distinguish between pinctada maxima that comes in the golden-lipped and the silver-lipped varieties and pinctada margaritifera that denotes the black-lipped variety. Pinctada margaritifera (black lip) also produces white, silver, and golden pearls and the silver lipped pinctada maxima can also produce very dark or golden pearls and the golden lip variety can produce white and dark pearls, too. The unusual off color pearls are then typically chucked in with others of the same color and there is no way to tell them apart.

The cheap eBay Tahitians and South Seas are so-called shell pearls. Those are a type of fake made from ground up mother of pearl dissolved in lacquer and sprayed onto mother of pearl or tridacna shell beads. The more expensive ones are made in a precipitation process of dissolved mother of pearl precipitated onto a shell bead. The latter can be very convincing and look almost as boring as real South Sea PPBs.

Zeide