Is this a 12 strand pre pearl culture era necklace?

[Xpearlnoob1]

This is interesting. I recently acquired some of my grandmother's old fashion jewelry -- someone was really interested in buying it, which I thought was odd. No gold, no precious stones. Now I will take another look!

When Mae West passed away and her jewelry was auctioned, people were surprised to discover than some of the largest diamonds were fake. Mae had quietly sold the real diamonds to support the war effort (WWII). This actually made the jewelry more valuable.

Antique and vintage costume jewelry can be extremely valuable. Look for signatures or makers marks. If you can't find a signature of the maker be careful because a lot of valuable unsigned costume jewelry will have subtle characteristics that will allow people to identify who made it and when. There are a lot of books on the subject so you might want to look into that. It's literally a treasure hunt out out there these days because so many people either assume fashion jewelry is not valuable or that the makers + age of unsigned jewelry can't be determined. I learned this the hard way, good luck to you.

 

[BWeaves]

Hello, I've been considering these pearls that were left to me by a family member to be cultured fresh water rice pearls for 20 years. I've always wondered why they put big 18k gold findings on a necklace of relatively 'common' pearls.

Today I started asking chatgpt what they were and I was surprised at the possibility that they may not be common pearls. My first question is without fancy xray tools can I determine with 100% certainty that these are natural?

So far here's the evidence:
-The nacre is very beautiful deep and even
-the pearls vary in size going from 3-4mm long all
the way to 6-7 mm long in fringe cases.
-some of the pearls are very oddly shaped, there is really no uniform shape to the pearls on the strand other than they tend to be wider than they are thick.
-The nacre is undisturbed when transitioning from outside of the pearl to inside, it's a nice smooth transition.
-they fluoresce under UV light
-old 18k gold findings.

Do you think they are old natural (not cultured) freshwater pearls? If so, I'm not going to be wearing them because they don't go well with my beard, so is this necklace something that could be too valuable to be left around the house?

Thank you for reading this, and looking at my pearls. View attachment 475712View attachment 475713

They look exactly like my Mom's cultured rice krispie pearls from the 1990s. Her pearls have 18K gold beads and clasps, too. Gold was cheaper then.