It's not the best idea to joke about a genuine pearl necklace if you know what's good for you. Why would you want to joke about the most genuine jewelry article on the planet? Of course, I am being sarcastic but that does not mean that the peal necklace is not the greatest necklace in the world. Some of the reasons that a pearl necklace is so different from a gold, silver, platinum, or even a ruby necklace is that is comes from a living shell.
Most of us know that a pearl necklace is not created instantly. It requires a long process once the pearls are found and brought to the surface. After harvesting, the pearls must be sorted. Since no two pearls are alike, sorting pearls is an extremely difficult and time-consuming process that is performed by pearl harvesting experts. Each pearl must be sorted by color, size, shape and brilliance. As a result, the pearls are handled hundreds to thousands of times depending on the process. After the sorting is over, the pearls are drilled with incredible precision. Unfortunately, an inexperienced beginner can split the pearls if careless.
A hole drilled even slightly off-center can ruin a pearl necklace or other piece of jewelry. Once the drilling is over, the time for matching and stringing begins. This often is more difficult than sorting since it requires the professionals to compare pearls that are similar in shape, color, and size for the purpose of finding a perfect match. After that is accomplished, then the art of assembling pearls into a necklace, a pair of earrings, or other jewelry comes into play. Only highly-trained experts with many years of experience under their belts can perform this rare task.
In order to understand the difficulty of this process, I will illustrate the following example. A pearl expert harvested 10,000 pearls and went through the sorting, drilling and matching process. But come to find out, all that work will generally produce only 47 perfectly matched pearls for a 16-inch necklace. So next time you gaze at your 16-inch pearl necklace, understand that it took 10,000 pearls to get there.