Where to buy pearls in Phuket?
Pearls are one of the most common souvenirs that tourists take away as a souvenir of Thailand. In Phuket, pearl jewelry is sold everywhere, in the markets, from street vendors, from sea gypsies, and in stores. It is extremely difficult for a simple layman to figure out what quality and origin of the offered pearls, you have to take the word of the seller.
In fact, the pearls that you can find on the shelves of Phuket come in at least three types: cultured, pressed and gypsy. We do not take into account all kinds of rough fakes made of plastic and other materials. According to experts, cultured pearls are the most successful purchase. To find out why this is so, Phuket News visited the Pearl Art Factory in Chalong.
The vagaries of nature
It is worth reconciling with the fact that there are practically no pearls in the origin of which a person is not involved, and if there are, they cost fabulous money. The explanation is simple: the chance of finding an oyster with a pearl in the sea is one in a million.
Natural pearls appear due to the fact that one of the thousands of oysters, for one reason or another, accidentally gets a grain of sand or other solid foreign body. To adapt this body to its environment, the oyster begins to cover it with mother-of-pearl, layer by layer. This process lasts throughout the entire life cycle of the oyster, which in marine representatives reaches 12 years. This is how a pearl is born.
Finding an oyster with a naturally occurring pearl is a rare stroke of luck and pure chance, which is why pearls have been cultivated. This process exactly repeats the natural one with only one difference: a person independently “plants” a grain of sand into an oyster and monitors the temperature of the water and the nutrition of the oyster, which affects the color of the resulting pearls. The colder the water, the darker the color of the pearl. For example, black pearls of natural origin are found only in Tahiti.
Farm affairs
Pearl Art Factory has its own farm in the province of Trang, where about 3 million oysters, sea and freshwater, are cultivated for pearls. How many pearls can you get from so many oysters, you ask? Not quite as much as you might think. Firstly, the process of pearl formation on the farm is as slow as in nature. It takes 5 to 12 years for an oyster to cover a grain of sand with mother-of-pearl 6-10 mm thick. Secondly, oysters have a very vague idea of what people need from them. So for 25.000 sea oysters, there are only 1.000 perfectly round pearls.
Sea and freshwater oysters differ in that the former can produce only one pearl in their life cycle, while the latter can produce about a dozen. Therefore, there is a difference in the quality and beauty of mother-of-pearl, which the oyster spends on a pearl. In addition, freshwater pearls, unlike sea pearls, never have a perfectly round shape. As a result, sea pearls are more expensive and more valuable than freshwater ones.
How much does it cost?
How much do pearl jewelry cost? In principle, the price strongly depends on the size of the pearls. For example, in the Pearl Art Factory, freshwater pearl earrings can be bought for 700 baht, a silver ring for 2.000 baht. But the price of a rosary with large sea pearls reaches 600 thousand. A ring with a sea pearl of 18 mm. will cost about 400 thousand baht. By the way, a cultured pearl of this size can only be obtained by transplanting a pearl from one oyster that has completed its life cycle to another. Because for 12 years of life, an oyster is not able to build up a layer of mother-of-pearl on a grain of sand more than 12 mm.
Honest jewelers do not make secrets from their work. So, in the Pearl Art Factory, visitors can watch the entire process of making jewelry through glass. All jewelry here is made by hand, and if the client has a corresponding desire - to order.
Pressed and gypsy pearls are cheaper, but the quality of the products is noticeably lower than in the case of cultured ones. So, pressed pearls are made artificially from mother-of-pearl crumbs of oyster shells. The product is fragile, the pearl can even break when dropped. And the pearls that the sea gypsies produce are made according to a principle similar to cultivation, but the result is radically different. Sea gypsies also plant foreign bodies in oysters, but they do not have time to wait about 10 years until the natural process of pearl formation is completed and it is covered with many layers of mother-of-pearl. Gypsies extract their pearls from oysters rather quickly, so the mother-of-pearl layer on them is very thin and short-lived.
