Pure Pearls Glossary
Matching
How consistently the pearls within one piece agree on size, colour, lustre and shape. A grading factor in its own right.
A necklace is graded as an assembly, not as a set of individual pearls. Twenty excellent pearls that disagree with each other make a poor strand.
Matching is expensive because it is subtractive. Sorting a hundred pearls to find forty that agree means the other sixty go to lower-priced pieces.
The exception is a deliberately multi-shaded or baroque piece, where variation is the design and matching is judged on how coherent the progression looks.
When you are buying
Check matching by laying a necklace flat in a curve, the way it will sit on the neck, rather than in a straight line. Colour drift shows up along a curve and hides in a line.
Read next
Graduated
A strand where pearls increase in size from the clasp to the centre — small at the neck, largest at the throat.
Uniform Strand
A strand where every pearl is the same size, within a tight tolerance.
Multi Shaded
A piece deliberately strung from pearls of different colours, arranged as a gradient or a scatter.
Pearl Grading
The A to AAA scale used to rate a pearl on lustre, surface, shape, colour matching and nacre. There is no global standards body enforcing it.
Not sure what you are being sold?
Paste any pearl description — another shop’s listing, a message from a jeweller, an old certificate — and we will break it down term by term.