PEARLS OF PRICE.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 22 August 1925, Page 7

PEARLS OF PRICE.

VALUABLE COLLECTION. GOLDSMITH’S EXHIBITION. For some odd reason, that large pearl lying all by itself on the glass top of the case disconcerted me (wrote a woman correspondent of the Manchester Guardian on June 6). It was perfect, in shape and colour, a lovely and desirable thing. But it was valued at something over 810,000, and when one remembered all the other lovely and desirable things that £IO,OOO represented —well, the pearl was simply disconcerting. One felt more at home with the strings of graduated rosetinted pearls worth on an average £2OO a string, and still more with the strings- of smaller glistening pearls, strings arranged like cut skeins, and fastened together with silver thread at either end, just as they arrived in Regent Street from India. This wealth of beauty, the beauty or wealth, was to be seen at the- exhibition which the Goldsmiths’ and Silversmiths’ Company are holding at their showrooms in [Regent Street. They have had pearl exhibitions before, but never quite such an important one, and they have selected this month because London is now full of visitors. PRIDE OF COLLECTION.

The pride of the collection is a necklace of beautifully matched and graduated ivory-tinted pearls, worth over £30,000. Another similar in size, but of the silvery white that requires a fair white neck to set it off to advantage, was firmed £14,000. The most costly pearl necklace the company had ever handled was worth, they told me, about a quarter of a million

Very' few people buy a. very expensive necklace outright, said the firm’s expert buyer. They usually collect the pearls and add to the necklace as new pearls are acquired, a task that may extend over several years. It took years to collect and match the pearls for the £14,000 necklace. He added that they did as much in the way of adding pearls as in selling complete necklaces. 'One lady, for instance, bought three pearls on a necklace to begin with, and presently began to add to them, till in sixteen months she had a necklace of about 120 small pearls at a' cost of £IBOO. He- did not quite understand the awe with which I regarded the large single pearl. It was not an uncommon thing, he said, to sell single pearls worth as much as that, or more. PALER FARTHER EAST.

Stringing pearls is an art. The few people who do it begin as apprentices, and gradually learn how to match the tints as required. Some of the things he told me about pearls were,, that the finest- pearls in the world come from the Red Sea. They have a warn, white tint. Those from the far coast of (India are paler, and Australia sends us silvery white pearls, hut no one knows they, whiten as they go 'farther east.. You cannot shape _ a pearl. You must accept it as it is, with all its flaws of shape and colour. and leave the surface untouched, and' it is not the fashion now to cut pearls in half and mount them The theory that pearls, to b e kept in good condition, must be worn, is based on superstition, not on fact. Provided that due attention is paid to dryness and temperature, pearls suffer no injury from being packed away. Pearls of enormous- value travel to and from England by post, and it is very seldom that they are tampered with on the way.

There are other jewels to I>e seen at this exhibition, some fine sapphires and emeralds, including a great emerald of 100 carats, set as a pendant in diamonds cut without facets, but in the new flat shape known as “baton.”