4 Ways to Tell if Your Pearls Are Real or Fake

hi i'm matt harris and i am a pearl specialist and pearl jewelry designer i love to help women and men understand and learn about pearls so that they can make informed buying decisions so they can understand what it is they may already have in their dressers or safes and so that they can participate with confidence in the growing trend of pearl fashion by far the number one question i get about pearls on a daily basis is how do i tell if my pearls are real or if my pearls are fake in this short video i will teach you exactly how to do that i'm going to give you four tests that you can do to tell you if your pearls are real or fake and then i'll talk to you about two myths about telling whether or not pearls are real or fake so let's do it test number one the tooth test i have two sets of pearls here one is real and one is fake now real pearls when you rub them on the bottom of your front tooth are going to feel gritty fake pearls are going to feel smooth they look otherwise the same these two you can probably not even tell necessarily by looking on this video one of them this one when i rub it on my tooth has a gritty kind of sandpapery sort of feeling the other one is ultra smooth my tooth kind of slides off of it that's the tooth test great great test for telling whether or not pearls are real or fake now you may be thinking in some cases maybe that's not appropriate let's say you are at an estate sale and there's pearls on a table and who knows who's touched those pearls that morning you don't necessarily want to get them and stick them in your mouth so another way that you can simulate that test is to take the pearls and rub them against each other the real pearls are going to still feel gritty you can kind of feel that through your fingers as they rub each other whereas the fake pearls this strand are going to be very smooth the third way you can do it is if you have a glass nearby say a drinking glass or a glass counter let's say you're at a store and you're not sure if they're real or fake there may be a glass counter you can do that on that's the tooth test and it works okay so the second test test two uniformity now pearls are kind of like snowflakes everyone is slightly different and even on a strand of pearls let's say these that i've already determined are real pearls on a strand of pearls if you look very closely between one pearl and the next pearl you may see something slightly different maybe it's a little tiny blemish that you wouldn't notice otherwise if you just picked it up but it's a blemish that you notice if you look under magnification or just look very closely if you see a blemish on that pearl go to the next pearl and see if there's a blemish there and maybe it's in a different spot if there's some sort of unevenness to the surface or even if they're not perfectly round because it's actually very rare to get a perfectly round pearl that's a very good indication that those are real pearls now the fake pearls on the other hand this strand when this is manufactured it was manufactured to be identical every single pearl on here is perfectly round perfectly the same shape and there's not a single blemish to be found likewise you can take a look at the coloration on pearls as well the pearl the fake strand is perfectly colored every color is the same on every every pearl there's no overtones whereas on real pearls you're going to get from the maker a sense of different colored overtones and you might have the pearls next to each other be slightly different in color okay so test number three is weight fake pearls can be made with plastic they can be made with glass a lot of them are plastic and so they're very light and if you were to hold the two strands together you had a fake and a reel there's a very good chance that the fake pearls are going to be very very light because they're plastic made with a coating now in this particular case they actually weigh the same or at least roughly the same the fake pearls here are very well made glass bead inside and that alone wouldn't really give you too much information okay so test number four a material check well talking about these two pearls again they're similar weight if i didn't do the tooth test i could take a look at a material check as well and on the fake pearls if i go like that and take a look at the drill hole especially with some magnification quite often you'll see the material build up around the drill hole so it actually kind of goes up like that as a sort of a mountain around the hole whereas on the real pearls you're going to have a pretty crisp clean uh hole from the purl drill so take a look to see if you've got any material build up as well sometimes especially on the older pearls you can actually take your thumb and what i would do is do it on a pearl close to the end near the drill hole and see if you can push aside the coating and quite often the fake pearls you literally peel up the coating that's not going to happen on a real per so those are the four tests but let's talk about some myths so often people come to me and say well i think these are real pearls because there is a knot in between each of the pearls and that's an indication that they're real somebody took the time to not uh put one knot in between each pearl the reality is is that i can take fake pearls and put a knot between each pearl i could take real pearls and put a knot between each pearl it takes the same amount of time and if i am going to create a strand of fake pearls and i want them to look like real pearls i'll probably put a knot between them because people think there's going to be knots between the real pearls so not an indication myth number two myth number two is the clasp often i get people that say well it's got a gold clasp on it so if that's 14 karat gold for example the pearls must be real who would put fake pearls on a real clasp people do it all the time and likewise i've got a silver clasp who would put really nice real pearls on a silver class also see it all the time i had a lady come into my store once with hematite which is a very inexpensive bead a hematite necklace and said will you buy this from me i'll give it to you for 20 i don't know if you want to carry costume jewelry and i said you know wait a minute let me take a look at that i looked at the clasp and it was 18 karat gold with some gems and probably worth about three thousand dollars on a strand of ten dollar beats so you just can't tell from those two things well there you have it i hope that you can go out now and grab the pearls out of your dresser the strand your grandma gave you or your boyfriend and see what you have i hope you're a little bit better armed at the garage sales and estate sales too or when shopping in a store and we'll do more videos with some more pearl education let me know what you find i'm curious to see what pearls you discovered as a result of this okay take care

Channel: Matt Harris

Views: 342,766

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Id: 9tnWAVHDRew

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021