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It’s a bit of a Manic Monday at Pearl Paradise this morning! It seems that a transformer blew during our little rainstorm last night and power is completely out in our office building and for most of our city block.
We are standing by to fire up the phones and computers are soon as the city restores the juice, so don’t worry about all those Mother’s Day pearls! We will be operational soon!
I launched my website, HisanoTakei.com in 2007. I was fresh out of grad school scrambling for a jewelry related job. I applied for couple of renowned and not-so-much craft shows to see if I can sell my felted work. To my surprise I was accepted to all of them. I decided to try out with one in Westchester NY. I had moved back to Los Angeles from NY right after graduation and took over my parents’ garage and made it into a one person sweat shop making about a hundred felted scarves all by hand.
Before I went to NY to sell my scarves I had my website built. The sole purpose was to showcase all of my wool artwork but I still had a passion for making metal jewelry. Since I wasn’t making any jewelry at the time I decided to have a place on the site that I can put in all my jewelry stuff for the near future. Jewelry making was the core of my art career and was always a significant part of me even when I was immersed in felting. I called it little h and the section sat quietly and sheepishly told visitors that it was coming soon for a few years.
By 2010 I’d been brewing some jewelry designs in my head and I would doodle some sketches here and there for over a year. I finally gathered all my drawings and started working on my Silhouette collection. I have been in love with the obscure shapes of Tahitian and South Sea baroque pearls. The unique shapes were attractive and I wanted to bring more attention to the outline of these shapes. I sketched out individual pearl silhouettes and sawed them out from sterling silver sheet. I oxidized the silver to make them look dark like the body color of Tahitian pearls and strung the pearls with these cutouts.
After one long strand necklace was finished it opened up to many more designs including the use of semi precious to precious stones. Now the collection has expanded to Golden South Sea baroque pearls with 14K yellow gold and canary diamonds. The simple Silhouette styles with precious stones have been particularly popular and have been worn by Olivia Wilde and Miranda Kerr. The collection is still growing and my next endeavor is to complete the collection using White South Sea pearls.
The next little h collection that was created was the Baby Freshwater Collection. I LOVE tiny pearls. I especially love tiny pearls that are lustrous and round. Most consumers associate higher prices in pearls as the size of the pearls increase. Small pearls in Akoya (5 mm and smaller) are very difficult to make and often times more expensive than the standard sizes (6-7 mm). Smaller Freshwater pearl prices vary with quality but round lustrous pearls under 3 mm are not as easy to find and they are not cheap. We found few vendors in Hong Kong that carried 2-3 mm pearls that have excellent luster and close to round shape. I started making multi strands for myself and ended up with an entire collection with them. The Baby Freshwater pearls are easy casual wear that you can layer with other gold or silver accessories. It works well with turquoise or corals during the warmer season or can be layered with onyx, smoky quartz, black diamonds or other darker colors for winter. The Baby Freshwater collection is dedicated to all the petite pearl lovers.
The Knot Collection began when I was designing for our wedding bands. Jeremy is twice as big as me and when he hugs he can wrap his arms around me 1.5 times. We’ve called it “pretzeling”. My thin wedding band was designed from a pretzel shape and his band was inspired by the trip to Greece. We saw various ornaments and jewels decorated with Hercules’ knot and Jeremy loved it. His band is a wide Hercules’ knot in 18K white gold. I was inspired to work with various knots and I introduced the first collection of Bows for Spring/Summer 2013 line. The bow necklace is suspended on 2-3 mm white freshwater pearls off center. Taylor Swift was spotted wearing the bow bracelet stacked with Baby Freshwater pearl bracelet. The Knot collection is a growing collection with more to come.
The Colorful Pearls Collection began when we made a five strand torsade necklace using multi-color and shape freshwater pearls. The stylist we work with had an opportunity to style the First Lady, Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama wore the torsade on numerous public appearances and became a popular item of little h. The collection has expanded to using ribbons and findings to layer pearl strands in a versatile way to style from day to evening.
The little h pretzel bracelet
Yellow Gold Bow Studs
We have also put together a collection of special items just for Mom! We’ve selected golden South Sea pearls, fireball pearls, freshwater, Tahitian and even a few akoya pieces with discounts of up to 50% for the month of May!
One of the most famous pearl stories of all time is that told by Pliny the Elder in his book, The Natural History of Pliny Volume 2. The story revolves around a bet Cleopatra made with Mark Antony.
From Pliny’s own words:
When Antony had been sated by her, day after day, with the most exquisite banquets, this queenly courtesan, inflated with vanity and disdainful arrogance, affected to treat all this sumptuousness and all these vast preparations with the greatest contempt; upon which Antony enquired what there was that could possibly be added to such extraordinary magnificence. To this she made answer, that on a single entertainment she would expend ten millions of sesterces. Antony was extremely desirous to learn how that could be done, but looked upon it as a thing quite impossible; and a wager was the result.
Legend has it that Antony took this wager and the next day Cleopatra held a banquet.
In obedience to her instructions, the servants placed before her a single vessel, which was filled with vinegar, a liquid, the sharpness and strength of which is able to dissolve pearls. At this moment she was wearing in her ears those choicest and most rare and unique productions of Nature; and while Antony was waiting to see what she was going to do, taking one of them from out of her ear, she threw it into the vinegar, and after it was melted, swallowed it.
This sounds like an interesting wager and sort of like the “grain of sand in a pearl” myth, the story appears to be plausible. Pearls are composed of calcium carbonate and if you were to combine calcium carbonate with acetic acid (the main component of vinegar) the result would be calcium acetate water and carbon dioxide. In short, the pearls should melt!
Personally, I wasn’t convinced. I’d never heard of vinegar getting splashed onto someone’s strand of pearls and it melting off her neck like the Wicked Witch of the West. So this called for a experiment!
During the time of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, pearls were always naturals. I wouldn’t want to take a chance destroying something as valuable as a natural pearl, but I could use non-nucleated cultured pearls. Pearls without an implanted bead don’t much differ from their natural counterparts.
The pearls also must be completely untreated. Today’s pearls are routinely bleached and pinked to even out the colors and add that slight hint of rose. I think it’s safe to assume that Cleopatra’s pearls were fine gems straight out of the shell!
It just so happens that every year we bring in four kilos of beadless cultured pearls that have had no treatments whatsoever – we call these pearls “raw material.” We bring them in for a monastery that uses them in religious ceremonies. So when they ordered the last batch, I brought in an extra kilo for us to play with.
First, I selected out a handful of the nicest pearls. I chose pearls with fine natural luster, nice color and good shapes. Then I did the unthinkable. I dropped them in vinegar!
Untreated pearls before the vinegar test
Then came the hard part – the wait! I shook the container, had a stare-down with several pearls from the clear plastic side and waited some more. Pretty soon I got tired of waiting and found something else to do. It started to seem that Pliny’s story wasn’t completely true to history.
After two weeks (that’s right, I waited two weeks), I decided that it was time to remove the pearls. I was convinced that the legend of Mark Antony and Cleopatra was exactly that – a legend. The story as told by Pliny simply could not be true. The speed at which a pearl dissolves in vinegar would have had them dining for months.
While my experiment was enough to convince me that the legend was a myth, I can state definitively that vinegar is not good for pearls. Take a look below to see what happens to pearls after two weeks in a tub of vinegar. They are nearly unrecognizable.
Pearls and vinegar certainly don’t mix!
Prepping for the Mother’s Day photo shoot
Second only to Christmas, the biggest pearl-giving holiday of the year is Mother’s Day! Every year we try to do something a little bit different, emphasizing the beauty of pearls, but showing moms just how important they are to all of us.
This year, team member Elia decided to invite her mother and her mother’s mother to the office for a Mother’s Day pearl shoot!
Three generations of beautiful ladies decked out in beautiful pearls make for an amazing photo shoot! Look for the final chosen images on our site and on Facebook closer to the big day!
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