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Pearls - SOUTH SEA PEARLS
These warm-water gems are best known for, relatively speaking, their considerable size. White South Sea pearls grow to between 9 and 17mm, and dark South Sea pearls reach 8 to 18mm, dwarfing freshwater cultured pearls and Akoya pearls. White-colored pearls, which in industry parlance also include silver and gold-tinted jewels, grow large because they reside inside a particularly spacious silver-lipped oyster.

White pearls are cultivated today at a number of locales bordering equatorial seas, ranging from top producers Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines to Burma, Thailand, Japan and Papua New Guinea. The large host oysters are captured almost exclusively off the coast of Australia.

White South Sea pearls are cultivated in the fairly standard saltwater cultured pearl fashion – by inserting a spherical mother-of-pearl nucleus along with a small mantle tissue culled from a donor mollusk. The range of possible shapes for White South Sea pearls range from round to oval to button to teardrop to baroque. The pearls, no matter their shape, undergo the standard selecting, drilling and stringing process.