Freshwater pearls are available in a wide variety of shapes, colors and sizes, and their prices are really attractive. Freshwater pearls play a major role in the pearl market. Most of freshwater pearls have baroque or near-round shape. Netpearls is proud to offer, out of all these pearls, the roundest freshwater pearls nearly indistinguishable from Akoya perfectly round shapes.
The mussels are grafted with pieces of mantle tissue, resulting in pearls of solid nacre. Their attractive prices allow women to dress high quality pearl necklaces at affordable prices.

Freshwater pearls are known for they wide variety of shapes, colors and sizes, their main feature is the nacre density and their surface texture. The nacre of a high-quality freshwater pearl is solid and thicker than the one of nucleated Akoya pearls. A single freshwater pearl mussel (hyriopsis schlegeli) can produce up to 50 pearls at a time in the same shell. Freshwater mussels are nucleated by implanting small pieces of mantle tissue of a donor mussel into the fleshy mantle tissue of the receiver mussel that will produce the pearl, so each mussel can withstand many insertions. Freshwater pearls are different from other types of pearls for price, longevity and nacre thickness.

The wide variety of colors and shapes of Freshwater pearls, make them suitable to be used in fanciful designer jewelry. Freshwater pearls are available in a wide range of natural pastel colors such as lavender, pink to peach, and every shade in between, in addition to the classic white body color. As regards their shape, we can find potato-shaped and stick pearls, rice-shaped and button pearls, coin-shaped and drop pearls, off-round and rarely round pearls. Netpearls.co.uk can offer the roundest freshwater pearls available, even extremely rare perfectly round. Freshwater pearl sizes range from 1 or 2 mm in diameter to 15 mm and larger.

Freshwater pearls are produced by several species of freshwater bivalve mussels, like Hyriopsis cumingi (triangle shell) and Hyriopsis schlegeli (Biwa shell), living in lakes, riverbeds in Cina ( Area of river delta Yang Tsé Kiang), in Japan (lakes of Biwa and Kasumigaura), and in USA (Mississippi River Basin). Despite freshater pearl mussels can be found in several areas of the world, Chineese pearls farms represent the global freshwater market and give almost all the production of freshwater pearls sold today in the world. A freshawater mussel is surgically implanted with 24 to 32 tiny pieces of mantle tissue of a donor mussel, used as a nucleus. Once the tissue has been inserted, a sac forms and cells begin secreting nacre, forming a calcium-carbonate compound - a pearl. Over the course of 2 to 7 years, the mussels deposit layer upon layer of nacre around the growing gems, generally producing more than two dozen pearls clustered on the inside of each shell. After harvest, millions of pearls are sorted carefully and matched for size, shape, color, and quality. Once the sorting is complete, loose pearls are available for sale individually and strands of matched pearls are sold on temporary strings known as "hanks."

While freshwater pearl production is mostly concerned by baroque pearls, Netpearls.co.uk is proud to offer the rarest and roundest freshwater pearls of the best quality. Freshwater pearls from Netpearls.co.uk are the most valuable and have a high retail value that you'd find at high-end jewelry stores. They have rich, bright luster, and their unique charm will last you a lifetime.