Yes! They're real and they're spectacular!

Lots of beautiful, colorful, and affordable pearls can be found in many shapes in sizes today in your local bead store.  So often our customers ask "Are they real?".  Our answer is "Yes, they are real and they are SPECTACULAR"!  However, there is a story behind how freshwater "cultured" pearls are produced today.  With the Japanese freshwater pearl production diminishing and a limited number of american sources, China has been dominating the pearl market.  Most pearls you find in bead stores are from China and they are made one of three ways.

They are freshwater pearls that have been formed the old-fashioned way of a piece of sand or other "irritant" finding it's way inside the mollusk and the mollusk then responds by coating the irritant with a smoothing saliva called nacre.  Man has taken it a step further and discovered that by inserting a small piece of fleshy mantel from a donor mollusk they can have a nice round pearl in about two years.  Same process just man initiating the irritant!  Freshwater mollusks can produce up to 20 pearls during each cultivation period which leads them to be a LOT less expensive than their saltwater, single pearl producing oyster cousins.   The third way is a bit more interesting and has led us to see amazing shapes of pearls like Xs, crosses, needles, stars, triangles, squares, popcorn, bi-lobes, petals, coins, and near-rounds such as ovals, potatoes, baroque, oblongs, cones, and teardrops.  This process is called bead-nucleated , and the process is implied in the name.  A bead is inserted into the mollusk serving as the nucleus around which layers of nacre build up. The bead is made of mother-of-pearl or similar shell-like substance, and it's usually spherical of one size or another. It was found that the nucleating bead could be any shape and still irritate the mollusk enough to nacre it over. Current day freshwater pearls are bound only by the imaginative shape of the nucleating bead and the imaginative people who carved them and prompted a clam to cover it over with its organic luster.  

The biggest misconception by customers is they are man-made, man is helping the process a bit, but 99% of the work is still done by the clam! Sweet Beads has lots of new freshwater pearls featured in our bi-monthly "Trunk Show" , stop by today to make something beautiful!!