Since my early days as a journalist, I’ve loved cultured pearls. Something about them spoke to me, including their rich colors and exotic overtones (such as peacock in Tahitians), their luster, and their variety of shapes. Baroque or circle shapes were easy to afford and that’s how I started collecting: I bought what I thought was pretty and could afford.

Today, both my personal acquisitions and my taste for more exotic types have grown—so much so I was tapped by the board of directors of the Cultured Pearl Association of America to take this role of both writing about cultured pearls and promoting them to grow the universe of pearl lovers.

Without a doubt, my own inner passion for the product started my pearl journey, but increased exposure to different types combined with education about pearls shaped my ongoing love affair with them. Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of people who didn’t love pearls who fell hard for them once I got on my soapbox.

“Have you seen the tiny Tahitians? Do you know about natural-color blue akoyas? How are you not obsessed with the natural colors of freshwater Edisons? You know farmers are growing bead-nucleated 3 mm ones now, right?”

To me, pearls are anything but boring, and once I share that excitement with others, it’s infectious. And when coupled with layers of the product—I’m not a dealer or retailer but, boy, am I wearing them, which I know has led to lots of pearl sales—this move drives people to trade show booths and store counters eager to buy.

In Asia, buyers jam-pack the aisles of pearl sections and absolutely clean out their inventories. I’m not joking. That doesn’t happen here—yet—but it’s shocking to me that pearls remain a niche of just 2–3% of sales in jewelry-only stores. Here's why I think that’s happening: lack of education and not wearing fun pearl creations.

Bizarrely, misinformation is also derailing appreciation, understanding, and sales. In a Facebook forum this spring, a retailer with a jewelry store in south Florida called cultured akoya pearls a “manufactured product.” Composite or lead-glass-filled rubies are manufactured products, lab-grown diamonds are manufactured products, but cultured pearls are created through an organic process with human intervention.

Cultured pearls aren’t being stamped out by robots on an assembly line in a factory—cultured pearls, particularly akoyas and South Seas, are hand-nucleated with polished shell beads in oysters one at a time. Then the oyster coats the bead with layers of nacre over a roughly two-year time frame in a protected body of saltwater. Somebody tell me how that is manufacturing.

This misguided merchant was likely thinking of the old way of tissue-nucleating freshwater pearls, which created dozens of misshapen ones in a single mollusk. Tens of pearls in one shell does smack of commercialism, but the process is still far from manufacturing. Newer South Sea–inspired, one-bead-at-a-time methods create one freshwater pearl per mollusk called an Edison type. That’s the bulk of what’s being produced today because they’re more desirable to the market.

I challenge you to let me change your mind about pearls. Text me at 267-481-4120 and I’ll meet you in Las Vegas and take you to dealers with pearls that will blow your mind. I’ll be wearing combinations of pearls that you’ve never seen before—which is an easy way to pique someone’s interest. Just wear interesting pearl designs! They’re beads—mix them into funky strands with colored gemstones and layer away. Wear ropes of ombre varieties and punctuate finished looks with shorter one-of-a-kind baroque or keshi pendants. Find me on the floor—I’m always wearing something fun, I’ll show you how much you’re missing in pearls, and I’ll supply you with a guide of who to buy them from. Wear comfy shoes, though, because we will have lots of ground to cover.

Hope to hear from you!

From the December 2020 Issue of #thisispearl digital magazine

For 63 years, the CPAA has been championing the stunning, exotic, and often misunderstood pearl and the people behind the product. During that time, the association has implemented various initiatives, including Pearls As One (PAO) education and the International Pearl Design Competition, to better promote the pearl and appreciation for it. Now CPAA brings you one more: #thisispearl, a bimonthly digital magazine.

#thisispearl is the CPAA’s custom hashtag developed three years ago upon my arrival at the association. Its purpose? To drive more awareness of the diversity of pearl jewels and kick aside stodgy perceptions because pearls are anything but plain. #thisispearl challenges dated ideas about the category and casts a spotlight on the fresh, now, and forward thinking. 

Still life image by Ted Morrison, Pearls from Eliko, Baggins, and Imperial Pearl.

Meanwhile, the mailing list of #thisispearl is in a category of its own. Some 86,000 pearl lovers are subscribed to the CPAA’s Shells newsletter, the delivery vehicle for #thisispearl. That list has a healthy base of jewelry store owners and their staffers as well as CPAA’s impressive PAO roster of students, the bulk of whom are based in the U.S. This makes our subscriber list uniquely niche (pearl lovers!) and the most powerful reach in all of the jewelry industry.

The pages of this digital publication will transport you to exotic destinations where pearls grow, introduce you to key players and little-known champions of pearls, drive home the status of pearls in the fashion and design world, and inspire awe and offer a peek at the process of pearl farming, which is truly a partnership between man and nature. We hope you enjoy reading about the hard-to-describe magic that is the pearl industry. Pearl people are often warm and empathetic, and that may have to do with the farming process and residual effects on others in the chain of sale. Beautiful pearls are a gift to man when oysters are well cared for; #thisispearl is CPAA’s gift to our community of pearl lovers.

Jennifer Heebner is the executive director of the CPAA and the editorial director of JenniferHeebner.com.

This article is from the Dec. 2020 issue of #thisispearl.

New York City. March 6, 2020. It was around February 2003, at one of the smaller Tucson gem shows, when Eric Braunwart of Columbia Gem House first saw pearls from the Sea of Cortez. 

New York City. Aug. 23, 2019. While pearls weren’t the only gem present in jewels at this year’s American Gem Trade Association’s (AGTA) Spectrum & Cutting Edge Awards, which took place Aug. 6, they were (naturally) among my favorites!

Chapel Hill, N.C. Aug 12, 2019. It was a Monet exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007 that got Travis Kukovich, owner of William Travis Jewelers in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a CPAA member, thinking differently about parasols.

New York City, Aug. 1, 2019. It was spring of 2017 when Aziz Basalely, founder of Eliko Pearl and president of the CPAA, first spied maki-e and mosaic pearls—lacquer and 24k gold powdered paint and abalone shell tiles, respectively—and they’ve been in his inventory ever since.

New York City. May 22, 2019. Greetings, friends, and welcome to spring and the pre-Las Vegas trade show season! 

Hong Kong. March 1, 2019. In 2015, CPAA member Alexander Collins, of the eponymous loose Tahitian pearl company based in the Takaroa atoll in French Polynesia, experienced a problem to which only Tahitian pearl farmers could relate: he ran out of mature oysters to graft.