By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
You won't find these Peacock baroque pearls at Costco -- the
string sells for $22,000 at the Tahiti Perles store in Waikiki --
but you will find other black pearls at the warehouse chain and
other discounters. A decade ago they were hard
to find and harder to afford.
Pearls
of reduced price
Tahitian companies
By Peter Wagner
have cashed in by bringing
once-exclusive black pearls
onto the discount
retail market
Star-BulletinTHEY'RE lovely, dark and deep. And they're everywhere. Once the rare privilege of an elite few, Polynesian black pearls today are dangling from the humblest of necks.
To the chagrin of fine jewelers, the lustrous gems of Tahiti and the Cook Islands are now circulating among Costco stores in Hawaii with prices as low as $100 for a pair of earrings.
That's low when you consider that a strand of top-quality cultivated black pearls can cost more than a house.
Now, it isn't hard to find a simple pendant for under $300 in Honolulu.
"They're even selling them at swap meets," said Pamla Aubin-Nury, executive vice president of Tahiti Perles, whose Waikiki store carries price tags as high as $190,000.
So abundant are the popular pearls that Tahitian oyster farmers are hawking them in Honolulu by the suitcase.
"This is one of the hottest things I have," said Brenda Reichel, whose King Street jewelry store Carats & Karats has seen a 30 percent increase in sales because of the popular pearl.
Reichel recently sent off a collection of her black pearls to a dealer in Nebraska -- someone she'd met at a mainland trade show. Like other retailers in Hawaii, she's become a wholesaler of black pearls to a growing market on the mainland.
By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
Tahiti Perles manager Joy Soma hefts the
Peacock baroque pearls.
At the Black Pearl Gallery, which operates at Aloha Tower Marketplace and on the mainland, business has also been brisk."It's so popular now," said Petra Halder-Nilsson, general manager at the store. "Ten years ago, people didn't really know a lot about them but there are so many promotions going on and Liz Taylor really helped with her perfume called Black Pearls."
The bonanza is rooted in French Polynesia, where the government set out 30 years ago to develop a new industry. Last year, more than five tons of the lustrous pearls were exported to the world.
Led by the aggressive marketing of GIE Perles de Tahiti, a government-backed trade organization, black pearls have gone from $44 million to a $140 million industry in Tahiti in the past five years.
Steven Lee, of Steven Lee Designs, saw the growing popularity and added black pearls to his jewelry collection in 1996. His business -- which supplies more than 100 stores here and on the mainland, has since doubled.
"The color, the luster and the size are spectacular," he said. "You can get lost in a black pearl."
Hundreds of pearl farmers are scattered among the remote atolls of the outlying Tuamotu Archipelago and the Gambier Islands, where the water is clean and thieves are few.
In these warm lagoons, from a large black-lipped oyster called Pinctada margaritifera, comes this gift of color and mystery.
While they vary greatly in size, shape and color, most experts agree that a truely fine black pearl is big, round, and evenly colored.
By Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
These black pearl earrings go for $5,700 at Tahiti Perles
in the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center.
Far beyond its name, a black pearl comes from its shell in a wondrous array of color, ranging from deep black to silver gray, pale gold, velvet green, eggplant red or smoky white. The colors are overlaid with an alluring translucent luster."You can almost look into it," Lee said.
Despite the wide availability of smaller pearls, the big ones still come dearly.
At Tahiti Perles, a leading dealer with a shop at the Royal Hawaiian Marketplace, an impressive strand was recently priced at $190,000. Few things are priced under $4,000 at the store, which prides itself on the large and lustrous pearls it harvests from its own farms.
Business at Tahiti Perles has more than doubled each year since the Waikiki store opened in 1994, said Aubin-Nury.
Still, she's concerned about the proliferation of off-quality pearls -- small, oddly shaped or blemished.
"It's hurting everyone," she said "Customers don't know what the true value of a pearl is."
But Lee, whose designs employ such off-quality pearls, finds much to admire in them.
"I wouldn't call them imperfect," he says. "They're like people. We all look different."
As for the perfect pearl, Lee prefers a drop-shaped pearl over the more idealized round.
"They're the rarest of the rare," he said.
