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Types of cultured pearls

A keshi pearl is a pearl composed entirely of nacre and results from mishaps in the culturing process. Most are quite small, typically only a few millimeters in diameter, and are often irregular in shape. In seeding a cultured pearl, a piece of mantle muscle from a sacrificed oyster is placed with a bead of mother of pearl within a host oyster. If the piece of mantle should slip off the bead, a keshi pearl forms of baroque shape about the mantle piece. Therefore, while a keshi pearl could be considered superior to cultured pearls with a mother of pearl bead center, in the cultured pearl industry the oyster's resources used to create a mistaken all-nacre baroque pearl is a drain on the production of the intended round cultured pearl. Therefore, the pearl industry is making ongoing attempts to improve culturing technique so that keshi pearls do not occur. All-nacre pearls may one day be limited to natural found pearls. Today many "keshi" pearls are actually intentional, with post-harvest shells returned to the water to regenerate a pearl in the existing pearl sac.

Tahitian pearls, frequently referred to as black pearls, are highly valued because of their rarity; the culturing process for them dictates a smaller volume output and they can never be mass-produced because, in common with most sea pearls, the oyster can only be nucleated with one pearl at a time, while freshwater mussels are capable of multiple pearl implants. Before the days of cultured pearls, black pearls were rare and highly valued for the simple reason that white pearl oysters rarely produced naturally black pearls, and black pearl oysters rarely produced any natural pearls at all.

Since the development of pearl culture technology, the black pearl oysters Pinctada margaritifera found in Tahiti and many other Pacific islands including the Cook Islands and Fiji are being extensively used for producing cultured pearls. The rarity of the black cultured pearl is now a "comparative" issue. The black cultured pearl is rare when compared to Chinese freshwater cultured pearls, and Japanese and Chinese akoya cultured pearls, and is more valuable than these pearls. However, it is more abundant than the South Sea pearl, which is more valuable than the black cultured pearl. This is simply because the black pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera is far more abundant than the elusive, rare, and larger south sea pearl oyster Pinctada maxima, which cannot be found in lagoons, but which must be dived for in a rare number of deep ocean habitats or grown in hatcheries.

Natural black pearls are rare, with black pearls having a body color that may be assessed as silver, silver blue, gold, brown-black, green-black, or black.

Black cultured pearls from the black pearl oyster – Pinctada margaritifera – are not South Sea pearls, although they are often mistakenly described as black South Sea pearls. In the absence of an official definition for the pearl from the black all use to, these pearls are usually referred to as "black pearls".

The correct definition of a South Sea pearl – as described by CIBJO and GIA – is a pearl produced by the Pinctada maxima pearl oyster. South Sea pearls are the color of their host Pinctada maxima oyster – and can be white, silver, pink, gold, cream, and any combination of these basic colors, including overtones of the various colors of the rainbow displayed in the pearl nacre of the oyster shell itself.

South Sea pearls are the largest and rarest of the cultured pearls – making them the most valuable. Prized for their exquisitely beautiful 'orient' or lustre, South Sea pearls are now farmed in various parts of the world where the Pinctada maxima oysters can be found, with the finest South Sea pearls being produced by Paspaley along the remote coastline of North-Western Australia. White and silver colored South Sea pearls tend to come from the Broome area of Australia, while golden colored ones are more prevalent in the Philippines and Indonesia.

A farm in the Gulf of California, Mexico, is culturing pearls from the black lipped Pinctada mazatlanica oysters and the rainbow lipped Pteria sterna oysters. Also called Concha Nácar, the pearls from these rainbow lipped oysters fluoresce red under ultraviolet light.